> Should head and tail be volatile in the definition, or should they be
> accessed with:
> int head = (volatile)myqueue.head;
> or with barrier() around the read/write?
The best way is to use barrier calls. It makes your assumptions about
ordering absolutely explicit. However you should still be careful - you
can't be sure that head will be read atomically or written atomically on
all processors eg if it was
struct
{
unsigned char head;
unsigned char tail;
char buf[256];
}
you would get some suprisingly unpleasant suprises on SMP Alpha. Currently
"int" is probably safe for all processors.
So unless this is a precision tuned fast path it is better to play safe with
this and use atomic_t or locking. The spinlock cost on an Athlon or a later
PIII is pretty good in most cases. Using the -ac prefetch stuff can make it
good in almost all cases, but thats probably a 2.5 thing for the generic
case.
Basically locks are getting cheaper on x86, the suprises are getting more
interesting on non-x86
Alan
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Jul 31 2001 - 21:00:24 EST