in our memory model, all atomics are supposed to be full barriers;
stores are not release-only. this is important because store is used
as an unlock operation in places where it needs to acquire the waiter
count to determine if a futex wake is needed. at least in the
malloc-internal locks, but possibly elsewhere, soft deadlocks from
missing futex wake (breakable by poking the threads to restart the
syscall, e.g. by attaching a tracer) were reported to occur.
once the malloc lock is replaced with Jens Gustedt's new lock
implementation (see commit 47d0bcd476),
malloc will not be affected by the issue, but it's not clear that
other uses won't be. reducing the strength of the ordering properties
required from a_store would require a thorough analysis of how it's
used.
to fix the problem, I'm removing the powerpc[64]-specific a_store
definition; now, the top-level atomic.h will implement a_store using
a_barrier on both sides of the store.
it's not clear to me yet whether there might be issues with the other
atomics. it's possible that a_post_llsc needs to be replaced with a
full barrier to guarantee the formal semanics we want, but either way
I think the difference is unlikely to impact the way we use them.
counts leading zero bits of a 64bit int, undefined on zero input.
(has nothing to do with atomics, added to atomic.h so target specific
helper functions are together.)
there is a logarithmic generic implementation and another in terms of
a 32bit a_clz_32 on targets where that's available.
previously powerpc had a_cas defined in terms of its native ll/sc
style operations, but all other atomics were defined in terms of
a_cas. instead define a_ll and a_sc so the compiler can generate
optimized versions of all the atomic ops and perform better inlining
of a_cas.
extracting the result of the sc (stwcx.) instruction is rather awkward
because it's natively stored in a condition flag, which is not
representable in inline asm. but even with this limitation the new
code still seems significantly better.
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.
Rich Felker
Szabolcs Nagy