Re: memory barriers (was: Yes, WaitLatch is vulnerable to weak-memory-ordering bugs)

On Wed, Sep 21, 2011 at 2:48 PM, Kevin Grittner
<Kevin(dot)Grittner(at)wicourts(dot)gov> wrote:
> Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>> But even a full explanation of that case seems like almost too
>> much for the comment of a header file, and there are certainly far
>> more complex cases.  I think anyone who is using these primitives
>> is going to have to do some independent reading...
>
> Maybe a URL or two in the header comments, pointing to relevant
> papers for the techniques used?  After all, years from now someone
> might be familiar with other techniques from newer papers and wonder
> what the techniques in the code are based on.

If there are any academic papers on this topic, I haven't found them.
Mostly, I've found lots of articles written by people who were coding
for the Linux kernel, and a lot of those articles are extremely
Linux-specific (you could use the smb_rb() macro here, but it's better
to instead use this RCU-related macro, because it'll do it for you,
blah blah). I'm happy to link to any sources anyone thinks we ought
to link to, but I've mostly had to piece this together bit by bit from
blog posts and (sometimes buggy) examples. It hasn't been a
particularly thrilling exercise.

--
Robert Haas
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