RE: Does Itanium permit speculative stores?

From: Luck, Tony
Date: Tue Nov 12 2013 - 13:00:56 EST


> Does Itanium permit speculative stores? For example, on Itanium what are
> the permitted outcomes of the following litmus test, where both x and y
> are initially zero?

We have a complier visible speculative read via the "ld.s" and "chk" instructions. But
there is no speculative write ("st.s") instruction. I think you are asking "can out of order
writes become visible in this scenario?"

CPU 0 CPU 1

r1 = ACCESS_ONCE(x); r2 = ACCESS_ONCE(y);
if (r1) if (r2)
ACCESS_ONCE(y) = 1; ACCESS_ONCE(x) = 1;

> In particular, is the outcome (r1 == 1 && r2 == 1) possible on Itanium
> given this litmus test?

The "ACCESS_ONCE" macro casts to volatile - which will make gcc generate
ordered "ld.acq" and "st.rel" instructions for your code snippets. So I think
you should be fine.

-Tony
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