[jmm-dev] weakCompareAndSet memory semantics

Andrew Haley aph at redhat.com
Fri Apr 22 12:03:37 UTC 2016


On 04/22/2016 12:32 PM, David Holmes wrote:
> I consider it a different scenario because it requires high contention. 
> If you have low contention (CAS ideal case) the spurious failures are 
> unlikely to make your data stale so jumping back out to the outer loop 
> to re-fetch doesn't gain anything - potentially the opposite!

Potentially?  Maybe that would be true if spurious store exclusive
failures were common, but they aren't.

> Obviously this all depends on the exact circumstances - but that is why 
> I question these blanket statements about weakCAS performing better on 
> ll/sc systems. Given we're dealing with WORA Java code this may push 
> people towards always using weakCAS just in case they run on a ll/sc system.

I just did 10^9 uncontended ldx/stx on my system here.  Guess how many
spurious failures there were?  Zero.  This is a tool for people who
know what they're doing.

Andrew.



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