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

[Geert Uytterhoeven]

On Thu, 16 Aug 2007, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Fri, 17 Aug 2007, Paul Mackerras wrote:
> > I'm really surprised it's as much as a few K.  I tried it on powerpc
> > and it only saved 40 bytes (10 instructions) for a G5 config.
> 
> One of the things that "volatile" generally screws up is a simple
> 
> 	volatile int i;
> 
> 	i++;
> 
> which a compiler will generally get horribly, horribly wrong.
> 
> In a reasonable world, gcc should just make that be (on x86)
> 
> 	addl $1,i(%rip)
> 
> on x86-64, which is indeed what it does without the volatile. But with the 
> volatile, the compiler gets really nervous, and doesn't dare do it in one 
> instruction, and thus generates crap like
> 
>         movl    i(%rip), %eax
>         addl    $1, %eax
>         movl    %eax, i(%rip)
> 
> instead. For no good reason, except that "volatile" just doesn't have any 
> good/clear semantics for the compiler, so most compilers will just make it 
> be "I will not touch this access in any way, shape, or form". Including 
> even trivially correct instruction optimization/combination.

Apart from having to fetch more bytes for the instructions (which does
matter), execution time is probably the same on modern processors, as they
convert the single instruction to RISC-style load, modify, store anyway.

Gr{oetje,eeting}s,

						Geert

--
Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- geert@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But
when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.
							    -- Linus Torvalds
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