unfortunately this needs to be able to vary by arch, because of a huge
mess GCC made: the GCC definition, which became the ABI, depends on
quirks in GCC's definition of __alignof__, which does not match the
formal alignment of the type.
GCC's __alignof__ unexpectedly exposes the an implementation detail,
its "preferred alignment" for the type, rather than the formal/ABI
alignment of the type, which it only actually uses in structures. on
most archs the two values are the same, but on some (at least i386)
the preferred alignment is greater than the ABI alignment.
I considered using _Alignas(8) unconditionally, but on at least one
arch (or1k), the alignment of max_align_t with GCC's definition is
only 4 (even the "preferred alignment" for these types is only 4).
when manipulating the robust list, the order of stores matters,
because the code may be asynchronously interrupted by a fatal signal
and the kernel will then access the robust list in what is essentially
an async-signal context.
previously, aliasing considerations made it seem unlikely that a
compiler could reorder the stores, but proving that they could not be
reordered incorrectly would have been extremely difficult. instead
I've opted to make all the pointers used as part of the robust list,
including those in the robust list head and in the individual mutexes,
volatile.
in addition, the format of the robust list has been changed to point
back to the head at the end, rather than ending with a null pointer.
this is to match the documented kernel robust list ABI. the null
pointer, which was previously used, only worked because faults during
access terminate the robust list processing.
at the very least, a compiler barrier is required no matter what, and
that was missing. current or1k implementations have strong ordering,
but this is not guaranteed as part of the ISA, so some sort of
synchronizing operation is necessary.
in principle we should use l.msync, but due to misinterpretation of
the spec, it was wrongly treated as an optional instruction and is not
supported by some implementations. if future kernels trap it and treat
it as a nop (rather than illegal instruction) when the
hardware/emulator does not support it, we could consider using it.
in the absence of l.msync support, the l.lwa/l.swa instructions, which
are specified to have a built-in l.msync, need to be used. the easiest
way to use them to implement atomic store is to perform an atomic swap
and throw away the result. using compare-and-swap would be lighter,
and would probably be sufficient for all actual usage cases, but
checking this is difficult and error-prone:
with store implemented in terms of swap, it's guaranteed that, when
another atomic operation is performed at the same time as the store,
either the result of the store followed by the other operation, or
just the store (clobbering the other operation's result) is seen. if
store were implemented in terms of cas, there are cases where this
invariant would fail to hold, and we would need detailed rules for the
situations in which the store operation is well-defined.
With the exception of a fenv implementation, the port is fully featured.
The port has been tested in or1ksim, the golden reference functional
simulator for OpenRISC 1000.
It passes all libc-test tests (except the math tests that
requires a fenv implementation).
The port assumes an or1k implementation that has support for
atomic instructions (l.lwa/l.swa).
Although it passes all the libc-test tests, the port is still
in an experimental state, and has yet experienced very little
'real-world' use.
Rich Felker
Szabolcs Nagy
Stefan Kristiansson