Several counter-examples were found which break in the
presence of store-to-load re-ordering. Strict fence
semantics are necessary.
Thanks to Paul McKenney for helpful discussions.
I accidentally swapped head/tail load in ck_hp_fifo (not in
ck_fifo, however). We must acquire head snapshot before tail snapshot.
An example execution history which could cause an incorrect update to occur
is below.
- tail <- fifo.tail / fifo.head != fifo.tail
- dequeue to empty (until final CAS which renders fifo.head = fifo.tail)
- head <- fifo.head / (head != tail)
- next <- fifo.head->next / next = NULL
- As head != tail, update to next pointer (where next is NULL).
However, if
- head <- fifo.head / (fifo.head != fifo.tail)
- dequeue to empty (until final CAS which renders fifo.head = fifo.tail)
- tail <- fifo.tail / fifo.head != fifo.tail
- next <- fifo.head->next / next = NULL
If we caught tail in final transition, the by the time we read next pointer,
head would have also changed forcing us to re-read. Thanks to Hendrik Donner
for reporting this.
Samy Al Bahra
Samy Al Bahra