[concurrency-interest] RFR: 8065804: JEP171:Clarifications/corrections for fence intrinsics

[David Holmes]

The "thorn" is the need for the barriers in the readers not the writers. (or
perhaps as well as the writers in some cases - that is part of the problem.)

David
  -----Original Message-----
  From: concurrency-interest-bounces at cs.oswego.edu
[mailto:concurrency-interest-bounces at cs.oswego.edu]On Behalf Of Oleksandr
Otenko
  Sent: Wednesday, 10 December 2014 6:34 AM
  To: dholmes at ieee.org; Hans Boehm
  Cc: core-libs-dev; concurrency-interest at cs.oswego.edu
  Subject: Re: [concurrency-interest] RFR: 8065804:
JEP171:Clarifications/corrections for fence intrinsics


  Is the thorn the many allowed outcomes, or the single disallowed outcome?
(eg order consistency is too strict for stores with no synchronizes-with
between them?)

  Alex



  On 26/11/2014 02:10, David Holmes wrote:

    Hi Hans,
    Given IRIW is a thorn in everyone's side and has no known useful
benefit, and can hopefully be killed off in the future, lets not get bogged
down in IRIW. But none of what you say below relates to
multi-copy-atomicity.

    Cheers,
    David
      -----Original Message-----
      From: hjkhboehm at gmail.com [mailto:hjkhboehm at gmail.com]On Behalf Of
Hans Boehm
      Sent: Wednesday, 26 November 2014 12:04 PM
      To: dholmes at ieee.org
      Cc: Stephan Diestelhorst; concurrency-interest at cs.oswego.edu;
core-libs-dev
      Subject: Re: [concurrency-interest] RFR: 8065804:
JEP171:Clarifications/corrections for fence intrinsics


      To be concrete here, on Power, loads can normally be ordered by an
address dependency or light-weight fence (lwsync).  However, neither is
enough to prevent the questionable outcome for IRIW, since it doesn't ensure
that the stores in T1 and T2 will be made visible to other threads in a
consistent order.  That outcome can be prevented by using heavyweight fences
(sync) instructions between the loads instead.  Peter Sewell's group
concluded that to enforce correct volatile behavior on Power, you
essentially need a a heavyweight fence between every pair of volatile
operations on Power.  That cannot be understood based on simple ordering
constraints.


      As Stephan pointed out, there are similar issues on ARM, but they're
less commonly encountered in a Java implementation.  If you're lucky, you
can get to the right implementation recipe by looking at only reordering, I
think.




      On Tue, Nov 25, 2014 at 4:36 PM, David Holmes
<davidcholmes at aapt.net.au> wrote:

        Stephan Diestelhorst writes:
        >
        > David Holmes wrote:
        > > Stephan Diestelhorst writes:
        > > > Am Dienstag, 25. November 2014, 11:15:36 schrieb Hans Boehm:
        > > > > I'm no hardware architect, but fundamentally it seems to me
that
        > > > >
        > > > > load x
        > > > > acquire_fence
        > > > >
        > > > > imposes a much more stringent constraint than
        > > > >
        > > > > load_acquire x
        > > > >
        > > > > Consider the case in which the load from x is an L1 hit, but
a
        > > > > preceding load (from say y) is a long-latency miss.  If we
enforce
        > > > > ordering by just waiting for completion of prior operation,
the
        > > > > former has to wait for the load from y to complete; while
the
        > > > > latter doesn't.  I find it hard to believe that this doesn't
leave
        > > > > an appreciable amount of performance on the table, at least
for
        > > > > some interesting microarchitectures.
        > > >
        > > > I agree, Hans, that this is a reasonable assumption.
Load_acquire x
        > > > does allow roach motel, whereas the acquire fence does not.
        > > >
        > > > >  In addition, for better or worse, fencing requirements on
at least
        > > > >  Power are actually driven as much by store atomicity
issues, as by
        > > > >  the ordering issues discussed in the cookbook.  This was
not
        > > > >  understood in 2005, and unfortunately doesn't seem to be
        > amenable to
        > > > >  the kind of straightforward explanation as in Doug's
cookbook.
        > > >
        > > > Coming from a strongly ordered architecture to a weakly
ordered one
        > > > myself, I also needed some mental adjustment about store
(multi-copy)
        > > > atomicity.  I can imagine others will be unaware of this
difference,
        > > > too, even in 2014.
        > >
        > > Sorry I'm missing the connection between fences and multi-copy
        > atomicity.
        >
        > One example is the classic IRIW.  With non-multi copy atomic
stores, but
        > ordered (say through a dependency) loads in the following example:
        >
        > Memory: foo = bar = 0
        > _T1_         _T2_         _T3_                              _T4_
        > st (foo),1   st (bar),1   ld r1, (bar)                      ld
r3,(foo)
        >                           <addr dep / local "fence" here>   <addr
dep>
        >                           ld r2, (foo)                      ld r4,
(bar)
        >
        > You may observe r1 = 1, r2 = 0, r3 = 1, r4 = 0 on non-multi-copy
atomic
        > machines.  On TSO boxes, this is not possible.  That means that
the
        > memory fence that will prevent such a behaviour (DMB on ARM) needs
to
        > carry some additional oomph in ensuring multi-copy atomicity, or
rather
        > prevent you from seeing it (which is the same thing).


        I take it as given that any code for which you may have ordering
        constraints, must first have basic atomicity properties for loads
and
        stores. I would not expect any kind of fence to add
multi-copy-atomicity
        where there was none.

        David


        > Stephan
        >
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