[pypy-dev] Would the following shared memory model be possible?

[William Leslie]

On 29 July 2010 18:02, Maciej Fijalkowski <fijall at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 29, 2010 at 9:57 AM, William Leslie
> <william.leslie.ttg at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I claim that there are two alternatives in the face of one thread
>> mutating an object and the other observing:
>>
>> 0. You can give up consistency and do fine-grained locking, which is
>> reasonably fast but error prone, or
>> 1. Expect python to handle all of this for you, effectively not making
>> a change to the memory model. You could do this with implicit
>> per-object locks which might be reasonably fast in the absence of
>> contention, but not when several threads are trying to use the object.
>>
>> Queues already are in a sense your per-object-lock,
>> one-thread-mutating, but usually one thread has acquire semantics and
>> one has release semantics, and that combination actually works. It's
>> when you expect to have a full memory barrier that is the problem.
>>
>> Come to think of it, you might be right Kevin: as long as only one
>> thread mutates the object, the mutating thread never /needs/ to
>> acquire, as it knows that it has the latest revision.
>>
>> Have I missed something?
>>
>> --
>> William Leslie
>>
>
> So my question is why you think 1. is really expensive (can you find
> evidence). I don't see what is has to do with cache misses. Besides,
> in python you cannot guarantee much about mutability of objects. So
> you don't know if object passed in a queue is mutable or not, unless
> you restrict yourself to some very simlpe types (in which case there
> is no shared memory, since you only pass immutable objects).

If task X expects that task Y will mutate some object it has, it needs
to go back to the source for every read. This means that if you do use
mutation of some shared object for communication, it needs to be
synchronised before every access. What this means for us is that every
read from a possibly mutable object requires an acquire, and every
write requires a release. It's as if every reference in the program is
implemented with a volatile pointer. Even if the object is never
mutated, there can be a lot of unnecessary bus chatter waiting for
MESI to tell us so.

-- 
William Leslie