Re: [PATCH 0/24] make atomic_read() behave consistently across allarchitectures

From: Chris Snook
Date: Mon Aug 20 2007 - 09:37:39 EST


Christoph Lameter wrote:
On Fri, 17 Aug 2007, Paul E. McKenney wrote:

On Sat, Aug 18, 2007 at 08:09:13AM +0800, Herbert Xu wrote:
On Fri, Aug 17, 2007 at 04:59:12PM -0700, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
gcc bugzilla bug #33102, for whatever that ends up being worth. ;-)
I had totally forgotten that I'd already filed that bug more
than six years ago until they just closed yours as a duplicate
of mine :)

Good luck in getting it fixed!
Well, just got done re-opening it for the third time. And a local
gcc community member advised me not to give up too easily. But I
must admit that I am impressed with the speed that it was identified
as duplicate.

Should be entertaining! ;-)

Right. ROTFL... volatile actually breaks atomic_t instead of making it safe. x++ becomes a register load, increment and a register store. Without volatile we can increment the memory directly. It seems that volatile requires that the variable is loaded into a register first and then operated upon. Understandable when you think about volatile being used to access memory mapped I/O registers where a RMW operation could be problematic.

So, if we want consistent behavior, we're pretty much screwed unless we use inline assembler everywhere?

-- Chris
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