Alex Kogan — New locks for the old kernel

Locks remain the main synchronization mechanism in userspace applications as well as in OS kernels. Despite significant progress in the design and implementation of efficient locks in userspace, kernel locks fail to keep up. Part of the reason is the unique nature of the kernel environment in which such locks are deployed. For instance, the Linux kernel requires spinlocks that use just 4 bytes of memory, significantly less than many of the modern locks need. In this talk Alex will describe recent efforts t