Re: Does Itanium permit speculative stores?

[Paul E. McKenney]

On Tue, Nov 12, 2013 at 06:00:26PM +0000, Luck, Tony wrote:
> > Does Itanium permit speculative stores?  For example, on Itanium what are
> > the permitted outcomes of the following litmus test, where both x and y
> > are initially zero?
> 
> We have a complier visible speculative read via the "ld.s" and "chk" instructions. But
> there is no speculative write ("st.s") instruction.  I think you are asking "can out of order
> writes become visible in this scenario?"
> 
> 	CPU 0				CPU 1
> 
> 	r1 = ACCESS_ONCE(x);		r2 = ACCESS_ONCE(y);
> 	if (r1)				if (r2)
> 		ACCESS_ONCE(y) = 1;		ACCESS_ONCE(x) = 1;
> 
> > In particular, is the outcome (r1 == 1 && r2 == 1) possible on Itanium
> > given this litmus test?
> 
> The "ACCESS_ONCE" macro casts to volatile - which will make gcc generate
> ordered "ld.acq" and "st.rel" instructions for your code snippets. So I think
> you should be fine.

Excellent!!!  Thank you for the information!

If I understand you correctly, this underscores the importance of
using ACCESS_ONCE() -- if you omit them in the above scenario, perhaps
you can see out-of-order stores becoming visible in this scenario?

Also, this resolves our earlier IRC discussion about Itanium's lack of
read-read cache coherence.  If you use ACCESS_ONCE properly, then on
Itanium the reads will become ld.acq instructions, ensuring the expected
cache coherence.

Very nice!

							Thanx, Paul

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