My One Slide

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My One Slide
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Seriously, though
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Preemptive threads
are difficult to reason about.

• The idea
• Compiler inserts guarded yield points
• Runtime preempts by setting a flag
• Loader can verify placement of yield points
• Applications
• Eliminate fine-grained locks (CCured, Java)
• Can we design a thread system that uses only this
  mechanism for synchronization?
• Key principle Compiler makes simplifying
  assumptions and tells runtime system!

Cooperative threads
might refuse to yield.
Semi-cooperative threads
offer the best of both worlds!