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Atomic transactions have proven to be an important technique for constructing reliable applications. Traditionally, transactions have been extended to distributed environments through the use of function shipping, a technique in which message passing or remote procedure calls are used to invoke computational requests on remote nodes. Recently, the data sharing approach to constructing distributed applications has received attention in the form of distributed file systems and distributed shared virtual memory. Applying the data sharing approach to transactions produces transactional distributed shared memory (TDSM) which yields benefits for a certain class of distributed application.
The union of transactions and distributed shared memory offers synergies in transaction recovery, concurrency control, and coherency control, but introduces challenges in transaction recovery. In this dissertation, I describe the design of a system that provides TDSM in the form of distributed recoverable virtual memory. Using the external pager interface of the Mach operating system, I implemented a prototype based on the Camelot distributed transaction facility. I analyze the prototype and its performance, offer techniques for improving the design of future TDSM systems, and characterize the applications for which TDSM is useful.