Using Hardware Transaction Primitives for Implementing Non-Transactional Escape Actions Inside Transactions

Mechanisms are provided for performing escape actions within transactions. These mechanisms execute a transaction comprising a transactional section and an escape action. The transactional section is comprised of one or more instructions that are to be executed in an atomic manner as part of the transaction. The escape action is comprised of one or more instructions to be executed in a non-transactional manner. These mechanisms further populate at least one actions list data structure, associated with a thread of the data processing system that is executing the transaction, with one or more actions associated with the escape action. Moreover, these mechanisms execute one or more actions in the actions list data structure based upon whether the transaction commits successfully or is aborted.