Kovan: From Production MVCC Systems to Wait-Free Memory Reclamation
4 days ago
- #rust
- #concurrency
- #memory-reclamation
- Kovan is a wait-free memory reclamation system built in Rust, addressing issues in lock-free systems like crossbeam-epoch.
- Lock-free systems can suffer from unbounded memory growth if a single thread stalls, whereas wait-free systems ensure bounded steps per operation.
- Kovan implements the Crystalline paper's approach, offering better performance in read-heavy workloads and no_std support for embedded use.
- Performance benchmarks show Kovan is 36% faster in pin overhead and 1.3-1.4x faster in read-heavy workloads compared to crossbeam-epoch.
- Kovan includes a suite of wait-free data structures (HashMap, Queue, Channels, MVCC) and formal verification via TLA+ to ensure correctness.
- Wait-free reclamation is critical for cloud services, financial trading, real-time analytics, HPC, and distributed databases to meet SLAs and memory quotas.
- Kovan is production-ready, available on crates.io, and used in SpireDB, with an API designed for easy migration from crossbeam-epoch.