Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

University of Rochester

Michael F Spear

Galen Clyde Hunt

Virendra J Marathe

James R Larus

Steven P Levi

Sandhya Dwarkadas

David R Tarditi

Michael L Scott

Arrvindh Shriraman

Manuel A Fähndrich

Orion Hodson

Michael Carbin

Bjame Steensgaard

In a transactional memory technique, hardware serves simply to optimize the performance of transactions that are controlled fundamentally by software. The hardware support reduces the overhead of common TM tasks&#x2014;conflict detection, validation, and data isolation&#x2014;for common-case bounded transactions. Software control preserves policy flexibility and supports transactions unbounded in space and in time. The hardware includes 1) an alert-on-update mechanism for fast software-controlled conflict detection; and 2) programmable data isolation, allowing potentially conflicting readers and writers to proceed concurrently under software control.

System and method for hardware acceleration of a software transactional memory

In some implementations, the operations of a software system may include the execution of untrusted device drivers. The execution of an untrusted device driver may be initiated when an untrusted device driver that is a set of executable instructions is obtained. A computing resource for the execution of the device driver may be further determined from a device-driver manifest of the untrusted device driver. Computing resources may include one or more of a hardware resource, a memory, an input/output port, an interrupt request line, and an inter-process communication channel. Trusted local access objects may be used by the untrusted device driver to access the computing resources.

Configuration of isolated extensions and device drivers

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Rochester, NY, United States of America

Michael F Spear