Re: [RFC][PATCH 0/5] arch: atomic rework

[Will Deacon]

On Fri, Feb 07, 2014 at 05:06:54PM +0000, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 07, 2014 at 04:55:48PM +0000, Will Deacon wrote:
> > Hi Paul,
> > 
> > On Fri, Feb 07, 2014 at 04:50:28PM +0000, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> > > On Fri, Feb 07, 2014 at 08:44:05AM +0100, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> > > > On Thu, Feb 06, 2014 at 08:20:51PM -0800, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> > > > > Hopefully some discussion of out-of-thin-air values as well.
> > > > 
> > > > Yes, absolutely shoot store speculation in the head already. Then drive
> > > > a wooden stake through its hart.
> > > > 
> > > > C11/C++11 should not be allowed to claim itself a memory model until that
> > > > is sorted.
> > > 
> > > There actually is a proposal being put forward, but it might not make ARM
> > > and Power people happy because it involves adding a compare, a branch,
> > > and an ISB/isync after every relaxed load...  Me, I agree with you,
> > > much preferring the no-store-speculation approach.
> > 
> > Can you elaborate a bit on this please? We don't permit speculative stores
> > in the ARM architecture, so it seems counter-intuitive that GCC needs to
> > emit any additional instructions to prevent that from happening.
> > 
> > Stores can, of course, be observed out-of-order but that's a lot more
> > reasonable :)
> 
> This is more about the compiler speculating on stores; imagine:
> 
>   if (x)
>   	y = 1;
>   else
>   	y = 2;
> 
> The compiler is allowed to change that into:
> 
>   y = 2;
>   if (x)
>   	y = 1;
> 
> Which is of course a big problem when you want to rely on the ordering.

Understood, but that doesn't explain why Paul wants to add ISB/isync
instructions which affect the *CPU* rather than the compiler!

Will
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