• Tom Lane's avatar
    Further marginal hacking on generic atomic ops. · bfea9256
    Tom Lane authored
    In the generic atomic ops that rely on a loop around a CAS primitive,
    there's no need to force the initial read of the "old" value to be atomic.
    In the typically-rare case that we get a torn value, that simply means
    that the first CAS attempt will fail; but it will update "old" to the
    atomically-read value, so the next attempt has a chance of succeeding.
    It was already being done that way in pg_atomic_exchange_u64_impl(),
    but let's duplicate the approach in the rest.
    
    (Given the current coding of the pg_atomic_read functions, this change
    is a no-op anyway on popular platforms; it only makes a difference where
    pg_atomic_read_u64_impl() is implemented as a CAS.)
    
    In passing, also remove unnecessary take-a-pointer-and-dereference-it
    coding in the pg_atomic_read functions.  That seems to have been based
    on a misunderstanding of what the C standard requires.  What actually
    matters is that the pointer be declared as pointing to volatile, which
    it is.
    
    I don't believe this will change the assembly code at all on x86
    platforms (even ignoring the likelihood that these implementations
    get overridden by others); but it may help on less-mainstream CPUs.
    
    Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/13707.1504718238@sss.pgh.pa.us
    bfea9256
generic.h 10.9 KB