Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 17 Jun 2015 11:02:14 -0700 | From | "Paul E. McKenney" <> | Subject | Re: [PATCH 11/18] seqcount: Introduce raw_write_seqcount_barrier() |
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On Wed, Jun 17, 2015 at 07:11:40PM +0200, Peter Zijlstra wrote: > On Wed, Jun 17, 2015 at 09:37:31AM -0700, Paul E. McKenney wrote: > > The point of std::atomic<> (and of the equivalent C11 syntax) is to > > force the compiler to suppress optimizations that are unsafe for shared > > variables. We get more or less the same effect with volatile, protests > > from compiler people notwithstanding. > > > > I often tell the compiler guys that they have to expect make -some- > > concessions for being 30 years late to the concurrency party, but > > it nevertheless makes sense to future-proof our code where it is > > reasonable to do so. > > Right, so in that regards I would request the compiler option (and or > #pragma) that disables all the out-of-thin-air nonsense.
OK. What is the form of the #pragma? If it focuses on a specific access, we are likely to get a lot of pushback.
> Because while they hide behind their undefined behaviour, the fact is > that all of their machines for the past 30 odd years have been relying > on this 'undefined' behaviour to work. This being the machines they've > been typing their useless specs on :-)
Maybe I can scare them into doing all their work on UP systems. ;-)
Interestingly enough, LLVM is taking a slightly different approach. Rather than invoke undefined behavior, they say that data races result in random bits being loaded. Not that it makes much difference to the health and well-being of the software, mind you...
> I doubt there's a single OS kernel (that supports SMP configurations) > that does not rely on a whole host of 'undefined' behaviour.
An alternative approach would be a compiler switch (or similar) that changed the default atomic access from SC to relaxed. Then shared variables could be marked atomic, and normal C code could be used to access them, but without the compiler emitting memory barriers all over the place (yes, even on x86).
Thanx, Paul
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