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SubjectRe: [PATCH] 2.1.88 Hanging Processes (Uninterruptible Sleep)


On Tue, 3 Mar 1998, Gerard Roudier wrote:
> >
> > But because it has been factored outside the loop, the loop now has fewer
> > "synchronization points" - ie atomic isntructions (or cpuid). So now the
> > PPro/PentiumII starts to re-order instructions inside the queue a lot more
>
> I would think that the problem is not specific to PPro/PII and that the
> good explanation is likely a wrong memory ordering assumption in the
> code rather that intruction reordering. However, I agree that instruction
> re-ordering increases the probability of memory read/write being reordered.

Note that the _fundamental_ problem is really that intel doesn't know the
concept of having a "memory barrier". The right way to solve this problem
is really to have a memory barrier between the two instructions, but the
way intel thinks about these things they only have a concept of a
"synchronization point".

If you read an alpha manual, you'll notice that the alpha people know what
the issue is, and you'll find that an alpha has three different kinds of
memory barriers: read barriers, write barriers and a read-write barrier
(which is usually just called a "memory barrier" and which acts the way an
intel "synchronization point" acts wrt memory ordering).

So yes, the fundamental problem is not instruction re-ordering, but memory
access re-ordering. But on intel, the only way you can handle this is with
one of these synchronization points (and they are expensive - cpuid is one
of the cheapest ones, but it trashes a lot of registers which results in
secondary expenses due to reloads etc that the CPU can't even optimize due
to the very same memory ordering constraints that the cpuid is there to
add..).

Linus


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