ACCESS_ONCE() [LWN.net]

ACCESS_ONCE()

Posted Aug 10, 2012 15:40 UTC (Fri) by daglwn (subscriber, #65432)
In reply to: ACCESS_ONCE() by quanstro
Parent article: ACCESS_ONCE()

> the claim above is that the choice is to
> (a) follow the standard, or
> (b) do something arbitrary.

This is a false choice. (a) and (b) are the same thing in the presence of undefined/unspecified/implementation-defined behavior. And it's not arbitrary. It's the decision of the compiler engineers.

> personally, i find this sort of code reorg by compilers
> to be problematic as it generally makes code quite hard
> to reason about. experienced developers would lift the
> assignment out of the loop if it mattered, and it were
> legal.

I hear this a lot. Then people get surprised when I show them what the compiler did to their code. Believe me, there is no reason anyone should waste time hand-optimizing code without proof of need. Either they're going to miss a lot of opportunity or they are going to screw things up and make the compiler's job harder.

If a developer were to hand-optimize code to achieve the same performance result, the source code would be unmaintainable.

We want optimizing compilers. I can't believe anyone would suggest otherwise.

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ACCESS_ONCE()

Posted Aug 12, 2012 16:16 UTC (Sun) by quanstro (guest, #77996) [Link]

in the example given in the op, there was no reason for the read to be in the
loop, except if it might change. the compiler made the assumption that the
coder was wrong. that might not be a useful assumption.

as i see it, the trade-off here is non-standard constructions, and the
principle of least surprise for performance.

i'm not convinced of the claim that this is always a win.

the compiler i use on a daily basis does not do strength reduction or optimize
away indirection. it assumes you know what you're doing. i don't notice that
it is slower. i also don't have to worry that the compiler will break my
drivers by "optimizing" them.

(never mind that with modern intel cpus, strength reduction can be a loss due
to microop caching.)

i think this is a good trade off for my case because it avoids obtuse, and
non-portable constructions that can be hard to remember to apply. that is,
for most code, developer time is more expensive than run time.

just my two cents, and i realize that there are cases in the linux kernel
where complex macros need this sort of optimization. but perhaps that's
complexity begetting itself.

ACCESS_ONCE()

Posted Aug 13, 2012 12:05 UTC (Mon) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]

>in the example given in the op, there was no reason for the read to be in the
> loop, except if it might change. the compiler made the assumption that the
> coder was wrong. that might not be a useful assumption.

No, the coder *was* wrong, and the assumption is *always correct in standard C*. That's the point. The programmer might have assumed semantics which are not C, but the compiler merely assumed that the programmer was writing in C, not writing in some unspecified language that looks a lot *like* C and exists only in the programmer's head.

It is axiomatic that a valid optimisation (ie. one which precisely follows C semantics, and any which don't are buggy and tend to be quickly fixed) cannot break correct valid C; if code breaks then it is because the programmer has made incorrect assumptions about the exact meaning *in C* of what they're writing.

If your variable might change between accesses, then you need to tell the compiler that, because it is not the case in the standard C model, which is why there's a keyword existing specifically for that purpose.

ACCESS_ONCE()

Posted Aug 16, 2012 14:52 UTC (Thu) by quanstro (guest, #77996) [Link]

i agree with what you say, but that's not the point i'm trying to make.
(and btw, i don't think that ACCESS_ONCE is standard c. nor can the
kernel be compiled with an arbitrary compiler; it depends on gcc.)

for me, making code safe from all possible according-to-hoyle legal
transformations of the code is not really interesting or useful.
i'd much rather focus on having a tractable, easy-to-use programming
environment.

if restricting the compiler from making some theoretically legal
code transformations reduces bugs and generally makes life easier,
then why not do it?

as it is i believe there are some gcc optimizations that can break the
kernel.

ACCESS_ONCE()

Posted Aug 19, 2012 19:38 UTC (Sun) by PaulMcKenney (subscriber, #9624) [Link]

ACCESS_ONCE() is simply the macro called out in the article, which simply uses the volatile keyword in a cast, which is part of standard C.