Re: [patch] i386: make bitops safe

[Richard Henderson]

On Tue, Feb 28, 2006 at 12:47:22AM +0100, Andi Kleen wrote:
> I remember asking rth about this at some point and IIRC
> he expressed doubts if it would actually do what expected. Richard?

It's a bit dicey to be sure.  GCC may or may not be able to look
through the size of the array and not kill things beyond it.  If
one could be *sure* of some actual maximum index, this would be
fine, but I don't think you can.

One could reasonably argue that if you used a structure with a
flexible array member, that GCC could not look through that.  But
again I'm not 100% positive this is handled properly.

I think the best argument for simply leaving things with a memory
clobber is that these are atomic operations, and are on occasion
used as locks, or parts of locks.


r~
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