On Thu, Feb 4, 2021 at 7:46 AM Dilip Kumar <dilipbalaut@gmail.com> wrote:
> How can we do that this is not a 1 byte flag this is enum so I don't
> think we can read any atomic state without a spin lock here.
I think this discussion of atomics is confused. Let's talk about what
atomic reads and writes mean. Imagine that you have a 64-bit value
0x0101010101010101. Somebody sets it to 0x0202020202020202. Imagine
that just as they are doing that, someone else reads the value and
gets 0x0202020201010101, because half of the value has been updated
and the other half has not yet been updated yet. This kind of thing
can actually happen on some platforms and what it means is that on
those platforms 8-byte reads and writes are not atomic. The idea of an
"atom" is that it can't be split into pieces but these reads and
writes on some platforms are actually not "atomic" because they are
split into two 4-byte pieces. But there's no such thing as a 1-byte
read or write not being atomic. In theory you could imagine a computer
where when you change 0x01 to 0x23 and read in the middle and see 0x21
or 0x13 or something, but no actual computers behave that way, or at
least no mainstream ones that anybody cares about. So the idea that
you somehow need a lock to prevent this is just wrong.
Concurrent programs also suffer from another problem which is
reordering of operations, which can happen either as the program is
compiled or as the program is executed by the CPU. The CPU can see you
set a->x = 1 and a->y = 2 and decide to update y first and then x even
though you wrote it the other way around in the program text. To
prevent this, we have barrier operations; see README.barrier in the
source tree for a longer explanation. Atomic operations like
compare-and-exchange are also full barriers, so that they not only
prevent the torn read/write problem described above, but also enforce
order of operations more strictly.
Now I don't know whether a lock is needed here or not. Maybe it is;
perhaps for consistency with other code, perhaps because the lock
acquire and release is serving the function of a barrier; or perhaps
to guard against some other hazard. But saying that it's because
reading or writing a 1-byte value might not be atomic does not sound
correct.
--
Robert Haas
EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
