Re: single copy atomicity for double load/stores on 32-bit systems

[Vineet Gupta]

On 5/31/19 2:41 AM, David Laight wrote:
>> While it seems reasonable form hardware pov to not implement such atomicity by
>> default it seems there's an additional burden on application writers. They could
>> be happily using a lockless algorithm with just a shared flag between 2 threads
>> w/o need for any explicit synchronization. But upgrade to a new compiler which
>> aggressively "packs" struct rendering long long 32-bit aligned (vs. 64-bit before)
>> causing the code to suddenly stop working. Is the onus on them to declare such
>> memory as c11 atomic or some such.
> A 'new' compiler can't suddenly change the alignment rules for structure elements.
> The alignment rules will be part of the ABI.
> 
> More likely is that the structure itself is unexpectedly allocated on
> an 8n+4 boundary due to code changes elsewhere.

Indeed thats what I meant that the layout changed as is typical of a new compiler.