lists.openwall.net   lists  /  announce  owl-users  owl-dev  john-users  john-dev  passwdqc-users  yescrypt  popa3d-users  /  oss-security  kernel-hardening  musl  sabotage  tlsify  passwords  /  crypt-dev  xvendor  /  Bugtraq  Full-Disclosure  linux-kernel  linux-netdev  linux-ext4  linux-hardening  linux-cve-announce  PHC 
Open Source and information security mailing list archives
 
Hash Suite: Windows password security audit tool. GUI, reports in PDF.
[<prev] [next>] [<thread-prev] [thread-next>] [day] [month] [year] [list]
Date:	Wed, 24 Oct 2007 21:29:56 -0700
From:	"David Schwartz" <davids@...master.com>
To:	"Linux-Kernel@...r. Kernel. Org" <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: RE: Is gcc thread-unsafe?


> Well that's exactly right. For threaded programs (and maybe even
> real-world non-threaded ones in general), you don't want to be
> even _reading_ global variables if you don't need to. Cache misses
> and cacheline bouncing could easily cause performance to completely
> tank in some cases while only gaining a cycle or two in
> microbenchmarks for doing these funny x86 predication things.

For some CPUs, replacing an conditional branch with a conditional move is a
*huge* win because it cannot be mispredicted. In general, compilers should
optimize for unshared data since that's much more common in typical code.
Even for shared data, the usual case is that you are going to access the
data few times, so pulling the cache line to the CPU is essentially free
since it will happen eventually.

Heuristics may show that the vast majority of such constructs write anyway.
So the optimization may also be valid based on such heuristics.

A better question is whether it's legal for a compiler that claims to
support POSIX threads. I'm going to post on comp.programming.threads, where
the threading experts hang out.

A very interesting case to be sure.

DS


-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@...r.kernel.org
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/

Powered by blists - more mailing lists

Powered by Openwall GNU/*/Linux Powered by OpenVZ