Re: [boost] Nonlocking data structures.

From: Patrick Twohig (p-twohig_at_[hidden])
Date: 2008-04-17 21:35:13

D'oh.  Single instruction I meant to say.

On Thu, Apr 17, 2008 at 6:09 PM, Cory Nelson <phrosty_at_[hidden]> wrote:

> On Thu, Apr 17, 2008 at 5:24 PM, Patrick Twohig <p-twohig_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> > Theoretically, the CAS should atomically compare and swap the value in
> one
> >  clock cycle.  However, with multiple cores/processors/hyper threading
> where
> >  multiple instructions are being executed simultaneously over arbitrary
> >  numbers of clock cycles.  There can be writes pending while you want to
> read
> >  from memory.  As a result, when you go to read something another
> process
> >  will have written to but you read stale data.  To combat this, you
> enforce a
> >  memory barrier, which guarantees that all pending memory transactions
> before
> >  the barrier have completed before moving on with the program.
>  Additionally,
> >  some architectures (like x86) allow for unaligned access of memory.
>  When an
> >  unaligned value is accessed, it sets an exception then it replaces the
> >  single read/write operation with multiple bus operations which wreaks
> havoc
> >  on any compare/swap operations.
>
> They don't happen in a single cycle, I don't think there is anything
> specifying that they should.  Barriers aren't needed on x86 or x64,
> other than compile-time only ones to make sure the compiler doesn't
> reorder something.
>
> Digging through my code, will try to get it up tonight.
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