Re: GCC libatomic ABI specification draft

[Michael Matz <matz@suse.de>]

Hi,

On Wed, 18 Jan 2017, Richard Henderson wrote:

> > Section 3 Rationale, alternative 1: I'm wondering if the example is 
> > correct.  For a 4-byte-aligned type of size 3, the implementation 
> > cannot simply use 4-byte hardware-backed atomics because this will 
> > inevitably touch the 4th byte I think, and the implementation can't 
> > know whether this is padding or not.  Or do we expect that things like 
> > packed structs are disallowed?
> 
> If we atomically store an unchanged value into the 4th byte, can we 
> tell?

You can't have a 4-aligned type of size 3.  Sizes must be multiples of 
alignment (otherwise arrays don't work).  The type of a 3-sized field in 
a packed struct that syntactically might be a 4-aligned type (e.g. by 
using attributes on char-array types) is actually a different type having 
an alignment of 1.  It's easier to simply regard all types inside packed 
structs as 1-aligned (which is IMO what we try to do).

That is, the byte after a 4-aligned "3-sized" type is always padding.


Ciao,
Michael.