Re: [PATCH 0/4] Provide C11 atomic operations

[Torvald Riegel <triegel at redhat dot com>]

On Wed, 2014-10-29 at 22:20 +0100, Torvald Riegel wrote:
> This patch set provides support for C11-like atomic operations.  It does
> not change existing code that that uses the current atomic ops, so
> callers of atomic ops can be changed one algorithm at a time.  (To
> illustrate such changes, the last patch transforms pthread_once to use
> C11 atomics.)
> 
> The atomic ops all have C11 semantics but use different names to avoid
> naming collisions with C11 operations.  If we should require C11
> compilation at some time in the future, transforming the calls of all
> atomic operations will be easy.
> 
> This expects, of course, that we use the C11 model.  The only difference
> is that I've chosen to not explicitly use atomic types, but rather just
> use atomic operations on plain data types.  This will work for existing
> code that is transformed.  For new code, it can mean that programmers
> have to be careful to use the right alignment if the atomic ops on a
> particular arch come with such constraints.
> If we get consensus for that, we can change to using atomic types in a
> second phase.
> 
> After acceptance of this patch set, I can provide additional
> documentation on the wiki.  However, I'd like to get some input on how
> much (ie, how much detail, etc.) documentation you would like to see.
> One reason to move to C11 is to not have contributors have to learn
> something new, so I guess that the glibc-specific documentation we'd
> need would be rather small in size.
> 

I plan to look a bit mroe at the code generated by a current GCC, but
otherwise plan to commit this next week.  Joseph and Will seem to be
okay with the patches; if one of you isn't or has additional concerns,
then please speak up soon.