[foreign-memaccess] [Rev 01] RFR: Alternative scalable MemoryScope

[Peter Levart]

On Tue, 5 May 2020 09:56:41 GMT, Maurizio Cimadamore <mcimadamore at openjdk.org> wrote:

>> No, it was not discussed yet. I'm happy you brought it up. That would not work. LongAdder.sum() is not an atomic
>> operation. Consider the following scenario:
>> - precondition: adder.sum() == 0
>> - thread A1 successfully acquires child segment: adder.sum() == 1
>> - thread C calls close() on root segment
>>     * sets state = CLOSING
>>     * calls adder.sum() which starts summing LongAdder cells and just misses adder.increment() of thread A2...
>> - thread A2 tries to acquire child segment and so it 1st does adder.increment()
>> - thread A2 reads state == CLOSING and therefore undoes previous increment with adder.decrement() and fails, but...
>> - thread C that just missed A2's adder.increment() does see A2's adder.decrement() because it is performed on a different
>>   LongAdder cell which C reads after it is incremented, so what C gets as a result of adder.sum() is 0, it completes
>>   closing the root segment by setting state = CLOSED and executing cleanup, but thread A1 still has access to the child
>>   segment and BOOM!!!
>> 
>> Having two LongAdders (acquires, releases) and doing the sum() per-partes sequentially: 1st releases.sum(), then
>> acquires.sum() we guarantee that we never miss an acquiring thread's acquires.increment() but see the thread's
>> releases.increment(), so above scenario is not possible.
>
> I agree with Peter that using a single long would misses update and you could see 'zero' when in reality something has
> happened but `sum` didn't get the memo. The entire approach, as far as I understand, relies on subtle happens-before
> relationship which arise precisely because of the use of the two counters (and the fact that one counter is always
> updated before the other).

...right and the fact that the sum() of both counters is performed in the opposite order as they are updated.

-------------

PR: https://git.openjdk.java.net/panama-foreign/pull/142