Kovan: From Production MVCC Systems to Wait-Free Memory Reclamation
Summary
A deep dive into Kovan, a Rust-based wait-free memory reclamation library implementing Crystalline, designed to replace epoch-based reclamation for MVCC workloads. It covers the 3am problem of stalled threads, architecture decisions, performance results, an ecosystem of wait-free data structures, formal verification with TLA+, and production relevance for databases and real-time analytics.