Re: [boost] [lockfree::fifo] Review

Subject: Re: [boost] [lockfree::fifo] Review
From: Chris M. Thomasson (cristom_at_[hidden])
Date: 2009-12-18 06:11:12

"Helge Bahmann" <hcb_at_[hidden]> wrote in message 
news:alpine.DEB.1.10.0912111612520.13830_at_m65s28.vlinux.de...
> On Fri, 11 Dec 2009, Andy Venikov wrote:
>
>> Helge Bahmann wrote:
>>> This is however NOT possible because you are not allowed to make any 
>>> memory access between ll and sc -- some CPUs (definitely older mips, but 
>>> not ppc, unsure about many of the other architectures) clear the 
>>> reservation on _any_ memory reference and will cause this sequence to 
>>> always fail. Alpha has the fun requirement of a memory barrier before 
>>> you are allowed to dereference "tmp", which just provides another way to 
>>> kill your reservation.
>> PPC as well. 7447, for example, will invalidate the "reservation bit" 
>> after writing to ANY memory location.
>
> Cool, this makes the whole thing model-specific behavior and thus even 
> more fun :) On the ppc 7455 available to me it not only works, but the 
> "stwcx." in fact behaves more like a CAS (it remembers the value loaded by 
> lwarx, and succeeds if it matches -- thus ABA detection won't work for 
> entirely different reasons).
>
> Other fun restrictions that I remember from some architecture manual (I 
> don't know which, think it was also some mips flavor): No taken branch 
> allowed between ll/sc.
>
> The message should however be clear: ll/sc is *brittle* and not usable for 
> ABA prevention.

FWIW, it's all in `Book II: PowerPC Virtual Environment Architecture' 
Appendix `B' which you can get here:

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/systems/library/es-archguide-v2.html

Especially section `B.3 List Insertion'.

You have got to take extreme care when implementing this on a PPC. You don't 
want something like false-sharing to break reservations. You have to make 
sure to align everything on cache line boundaries _and_ to ensure proper 
padding between non-related elements, assuming that reservation granule is a 
cache line. All of that good stuff!

;^)