[concurrency-interest] RFR: 8065804: JEP171:Clarifications/corrections for fence intrinsics
Oleksandr Otenko
oleksandr.otenko at oracle.com
Tue Dec 9 22:21:09 UTC 2014
In that case I must say I can't see why you mentioned "no known useful
benefit". The known useful benefit from ordering reads can be seen here:
store in one order:
Thread 1:
x=1
y=1
load in reverse order:
Thread 2:
r1=y;
r2=x;
This is a common pattern, so ordering loads is already useful. Here,
even though JMM talks about total order of all volatile operations, in
practice the order of loads is weaker, as long as this weakening cannot
be observed - eg on x86 enforcing order of loads among themselves is an
entirely local matter.
IRIW extends the store part to many threads, thus guaranteeing total
store order for volatiles. I thought the total ordering of stores would
be a more contentious point (but I agree with the point Hans makes about
easier reasoning).
Alex
On 09/12/2014 21:36, David Holmes wrote:
> 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 <mailto: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
>> >
>> > _______________________________________________
>> > Concurrency-interest mailing list
>> > Concurrency-interest at cs.oswego.edu
>> <mailto:Concurrency-interest at cs.oswego.edu>
>> > http://cs.oswego.edu/mailman/listinfo/concurrency-interest
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Concurrency-interest mailing list
>> Concurrency-interest at cs.oswego.edu
>> <mailto:Concurrency-interest at cs.oswego.edu>
>> http://cs.oswego.edu/mailman/listinfo/concurrency-interest
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Concurrency-interest mailing list
>> Concurrency-interest at cs.oswego.edu
>> http://cs.oswego.edu/mailman/listinfo/concurrency-interest
>
More information about the core-libs-dev
mailing list