despite being strongly ordered, the x86 memory model does not preclude
reordering of loads across earlier stores. while a plain store
suffices as a release barrier, we actually need a full barrier, since
users of a_store subsequently load a waiter count to determine whether
to issue a futex wait, and using a stale count will result in soft
(fail-to-wake) deadlocks. these deadlocks were observed in malloc and
possible with stdio locks and other libc-internal locking.
on i386, an atomic operation on the caller's stack is used as the
barrier rather than performing the store itself using xchg; this
avoids the need to read the cache line on which the store is being
performed. mfence is used on x86_64 where it's always available, and
could be used on i386 with the appropriate cpu model checks if it's
shown to perform better.
conceptually, and on other archs, these functions take a pointer to
int, but in the i386, x86_64, and x32 versions of atomic.h, they took
a pointer to void instead.
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.
Rich Felker
rofl0r