rather than having each arch provide its own atomic.h, there is a new
shared atomic.h in src/internal which pulls arch-specific definitions
from arc/$(ARCH)/atomic_arch.h. the latter can be extremely minimal,
defining only a_cas or new ll/sc type primitives which the shared
atomic.h will use to construct everything else.
this commit avoids making heavy changes to the individual archs'
atomic implementations. definitions which are identical or
near-identical to what the new shared atomic.h would produce have been
removed, but otherwise the changes made are just hooking up the
arch-specific files to the new infrastructure. major changes to take
advantage of the new system will come in subsequent commits.
If we're building for sh4a, the compiler is already free to use
instructions only available on sh4a, so we can do the same and inline the
llsc atomics. If we're building for an older processor, we still do the
same runtime atomics selection as before.
conceptually, a_spin needs to be at least a compiler barrier, so the
compiler will not optimize out loops (and the load on each iteration)
while spinning. it should also be a memory barrier, or the spinning
thread might keep spinning without noticing stores from other threads,
thus delaying for longer than it should.
ideally, an optimal a_spin implementation that avoids unnecessary
cache/memory contention should be chosen for each arch, but for now,
the easiest thing is to perform a useless a_cas on the calling
thread's stack.
the a_cas_l, a_swap_l, a_swap_p, and a_store_l operations were
probably used a long time ago when only i386 and x86_64 were
supported. as other archs were added, support for them was
inconsistent, and they are obviously not in use at present. having
them around potentially confuses readers working on new ports, and the
type-punning hacks and inconsistent use of types in their definitions
is not a style I wish to perpetuate in the source tree, so removing
them seems appropriate.
linux, gcc, etc. all use "sh" as the name for the superh arch. there
was already some inconsistency internally in musl: the dynamic linker
was searching for "ld-musl-sh.path" as its path file despite its own
name being "ld-musl-superh.so.1". there was some sentiment in both
directions as to how to resolve the inconsistency, but overall "sh"
was favored.
atomic store was lacking a barrier, which was fine for legacy arm with
no real smp and kernel-emulated cas, but unsuitable for more modern
systems. the kernel provides another "kuser" function, at 0xffff0fa0,
which could be used for the barrier, but using that would drop support
for kernels 2.6.12 through 2.6.14 unless an extra conditional were
added to check for barrier availability. just using the barrier in the
kernel cas is easier, and, based on my reading of the assembly code in
the kernel, does not appear to be significantly slower.
at the same time, other atomic operations are adapted to call the
kernel cas function directly rather than using a_cas; due to small
differences in their interface contracts, this makes the generated
code much simpler.
this port assumes eabi calling conventions, eabi linux syscall
convention, and presence of the kernel helpers at 0xffff0f?0 needed
for threads support. otherwise it makes very few assumptions, and the
code should work even on armv4 without thumb support, as well as on
systems with thumb interworking. the bits headers declare this a
little endian system, but as far as i can tell the code should work
equally well on big endian.
some small details are probably broken; so far, testing has been
limited to qemu/aboriginal linux.
Rich Felker
Bobby Bingham