[concurrency-interest] RFR: 8065804: JEP171:Clarifications/corrections for fence intrinsics
David Holmes
davidcholmes at aapt.net.au
Tue Dec 9 21:59:11 UTC 2014
In this case the issue is not ordering per-se (which is what dependencies
help with) but global visibility. After performing the first read each
thread must ensure that its second read will return what the other thread
saw for the first read - hence a full dmb/sync between the reads; or
generalizing a full dmb/sync after every volatile read.
David
-----Original Message-----
From: Oleksandr Otenko [mailto:oleksandr.otenko at oracle.com]
Sent: Wednesday, 10 December 2014 7:54 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
Yes, I do understand the reader needs barriers, too. I guess I was
wondering more why the reader would need something stronger than what
dependencies etc could enforce. I guess I'll read what Martin forwarded
first.
Alex
On 09/12/2014 21:37, David Holmes wrote:
See my earlier response to Martin. The reader has to force a consistent
view of memory - the writer can't as the write escapes before it can issue
the barrier.
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 6:04 AM
To: Hans Boehm; dholmes at ieee.org
Cc: core-libs-dev; concurrency-interest at cs.oswego.edu
Subject: Re: [concurrency-interest] RFR: 8065804:
JEP171:Clarifications/corrections for fence intrinsics
On 26/11/2014 02:04, Hans Boehm wrote:
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.
Why would they need fences between loads instead of syncing the order
of stores?
Alex
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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