Lock-free sharing of live-recorded circular buffer resources

Abstract

Novel techniques are described for lock-free sharing of a circular buffer. Embodiments can provide shared, lock-free, constant-bitrate access by multiple consumer systems to a live stream of audiovisual information being recorded to a circular buffer by a producer. For example, when a producer system writes a data stream to the circular buffer, the producer system records shared metadata. When a consumer system desires to begin reading from the shared buffer at a particular time, the shared metadata is used to compute a predicted write pointer location and corresponding dirty region around the write pointer at the desired read time. A read pointer of the consumer system can be set to avoid the dirty region, thereby permitting read access to a stable region of the circular buffer without relying on a buffer lock.