conceptually, a_spin needs to be at least a compiler barrier, so the
compiler will not optimize out loops (and the load on each iteration)
while spinning. it should also be a memory barrier, or the spinning
thread might keep spinning without noticing stores from other threads,
thus delaying for longer than it should.
ideally, an optimal a_spin implementation that avoids unnecessary
cache/memory contention should be chosen for each arch, but for now,
the easiest thing is to perform a useless a_cas on the calling
thread's stack.
the a_cas_l, a_swap_l, a_swap_p, and a_store_l operations were
probably used a long time ago when only i386 and x86_64 were
supported. as other archs were added, support for them was
inconsistent, and they are obviously not in use at present. having
them around potentially confuses readers working on new ports, and the
type-punning hacks and inconsistent use of types in their definitions
is not a style I wish to perpetuate in the source tree, so removing
them seems appropriate.
as far as I can tell, microblaze is strongly ordered, but this does
not seem to be well-documented and the assumption may need revisiting.
even with strong ordering, however, a volatile C assignment is not
sufficient to implement atomic store, since it does not preclude
reordering by the compiler with respect to non-volatile stores and
loads.
simply flanking a C store with empty volatile asm blocks with memory
clobbers would achieve the desired result, but is likely to result in
worse code generation, since the address and value for the store may
need to be spilled. actually writing the store in asm, so that there's
only one asm block, should give optimal code generation while
satisfying the requirement for having a compiler barrier.
based on initial work by rdp, with heavy modifications. some features
including threads are untested because qemu app-level emulation seems
to be broken and I do not have a proper system image for testing.
Rich Felker