Re: sinval synchronization considered harmful

Noah Misch <noah(at)2ndQuadrant(dot)com> writes:
> On Tue, Jul 26, 2011 at 05:05:15PM -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
>> Dirty cache line, maybe not, but what if the assembly code commands the
>> CPU to load those variables into CPU registers before doing the
>> comparison? If they're loaded with maxMsgNum coming in last (or at
>> least after resetState), I think you can have the problem without any
>> assumptions about cache line behavior at all. You just need the process
>> to lose the CPU at the right time.

> True. If the compiler places the resetState load first, you could hit the
> anomaly by "merely" setting a breakpoint on the next instruction, waiting for
> exactly MSGNUMWRAPAROUND messages to enqueue, and letting the backend continue.
> I think, though, we should either plug that _and_ the cache incoherency case or
> worry about neither.

How do you figure that? The poor-assembly-code-order risk is both a lot
easier to fix and a lot higher probability. Admittedly, it's still way
way down there, but you only need a precisely-timed sleep, not a
precisely-timed sleep *and* a cache line that somehow remained stale.

regards, tom lane