Re: [LAD] Atomic Operations

From: Clemens Ladisch <clemens@email-addr-hidden>
Date: Tue Dec 15 2009 - 11:14:25 EET

Paul Davis wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 14, 2009 at 2:45 PM, Stephen Sinclair <radarsat1@email-addr-hidden> wrote:
> > As far as I understand
> > this doesn't happen as long as you stick to the word size of the
> > architecture. (Anyone please correct me if I'm wrong about that.)
>
> unbelievably, perhaps, this was not true on SPARC. atomicity was only
> guaranteed for 24 bits of a 32 bit value.

On SPARC, 32-bit reads and writes were atomic, but unlike most other
processors, it was not able to lock the bus for atomic read-modify-write
operations, so 8 bits were used to implement a lock; see
<http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git;a=blob;f=arch/sparc/include/asm/atomic_32.h>.

Best regards,
Clemens
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Received on Tue Dec 15 12:15:03 2009

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