[concurrency-interest] RFR: 8065804: JEP 171: Clarifications/corrections for fence intrinsics

[Andrew Haley]

On 11/12/14 00:53, David Holmes wrote:
> On 11/12/2014 7:02 AM, Andrew Haley wrote:
>> On 12/05/2014 09:49 PM, Martin Buchholz wrote:
>>> The actual implementations of storestore (see below) seem to
>>> universally give you the stronger ::release barrier, and it seems
>>> likely that hotspot engineers are implicitly relying on that, that
>>> some uses of ::storestore in the hotspot sources are bugs (should be
>>> ::release instead) and that there is very little potential performance
>>> benefit from using ::storestore instead of ::release, precisely
>>> because the additional loadstore barrier is very close to free on all
>>> current hardware.
>>
>> That's not really true for ARM, where the additional loadstore requires
>> a full barrier.  There is a good use for a storestore, which is when
>> zeroing a newly-created object.
> 
> There are many good uses of storestore in the various lock-free 
> algorithms inside hotspot.

There may be many uses, but I am extremely suspicious of how good
they are.  I wonder if we went through all the uses of storestore in
hotspot how many bugs we'd find.  As far as I can see (in the absence
of other barriers) the only things you can write before a storestore
are constants.

Andrew.