Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 09/10] target-alpha: Implement load-locked/store-conditional properly.

[Jamie Lokier]

Richard Henderson wrote:
> On 03/25/2010 10:40 AM, Blue Swirl wrote:
> > Sparc V8 has two atomic instructions, ldstub and swap.
> 
> I know -- but not the CAS operation being discussed here.
> 
> As I think about this more and more, the Real Problem is
> not with the CAS, but with the memory ordering requirements
> of the guest vs the memory ordering of the host.  It's easy
> to implement things on x86, because of the host's strict
> memory ordering.  It would be much more difficult to properly
> emulate x86 on a relaxed memory ordering host.  We'd need to
> insert barriers between pairs of qemu_{ld,st} operations.
> 
> I may give this some proper thinking this weekend.

Some host architectures have a strongly ordered mode, which might
help, and be faster than putting barriers everywhere.

-- Jamie