On Fri, 26 Dec 2014, Matt Godbolt wrote:
I'm investigating ways to have single-threaded writers write to memory
areas which are then (very infrequently) read from another thread for
monitoring purposes. Things like "number of units of work done".
I initially modeled this with relaxed atomic operations. This
generates a "lock xadd" style instruction, as I can't convey that
there are no other writers.
As best I can tell, there's no memory order I can use to explain my
usage characteristics. Giving up on the atomics, I tried volatiles.
These are less than ideal as their power is less expressive, but in my
instance I am not trying to fight the ISA's reordering; just prevent
the compiler from eliding updates to my shared metrics.
GCC's code generation uses a "load; add; store" for volatiles, instead
of a single "add 1, [metric]".
https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=50677
--
Marc Glisse
