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

From: Vineet Gupta
Date: Mon Jun 03 2019 - 18:02:59 EST


On 6/3/19 1:13 PM, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 03, 2019 at 06:08:35PM +0000, Vineet Gupta wrote:
>> On 5/31/19 1:21 AM, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
>>>> I'm not sure how to interpret "natural alignment" for the case of double
>>>> load/stores on 32-bit systems where the hardware and ABI allow for 4 byte
>>>> alignment (ARCv2 LDD/STD, ARM LDRD/STRD ....)
>>> Natural alignment: !((uintptr_t)ptr % sizeof(*ptr))
>>>
>>> For any u64 type, that would give 8 byte alignment. the problem
>>> otherwise being that your data spans two lines/pages etc..
>> Sure, but as Paul said, if the software doesn't expect them to be atomic by
>> default, they could span 2 hardware lines to keep the implementation simpler/sane.
> I could imagine 8-byte types being only four-byte aligned on 32-bit systems,
> but it would be quite a surprise on 64-bit systems.

Totally agree !

Thx,
-Vineet