Hi Marc,

Below some questions about sequential consistency and critical sections in SMP Gambit.

The Sutter slides below illustrate the problematique addressed beautifully.

* Please have a look at the below and confirm that this is what Gambit does?

* In thread-local code does Gambit internally do any optimizations that alters the execution order? In C-compiled code I presume the C compiler can make such optimizations, and that in itself pulls Gambit to need to address this problem domain.

* The baseline constraint on Gambit's as well as any C compiler's optimizations are that optimizations that alter order will not span module-external calls, isn't it?

* Does Gambit offer any low level primitives for (critical sections for) doing low level in-module sequentially consistent operations between cores?

I.e. anything lower level than thread-send/receive and mutex-lock/unlock.

What about fence, acquire/read fence, release/write fence.

* Does Gambit guarantee that newly allocated objects have some initialization when accessed from any CPU core, or if malloc() gave trash then may a Gambit thread see trash?

Example:

Context: (define x #f) (##fence!) Core A: (set! x (vector 1 2)) Core B: (let loop () (let ((v x)) (if v (print (##vector-ref v 0))) (loop)))

Which are all possible values that may be printed?

C/C++ standardized SMP/memory model in the C11/C++11 specs. It's great to see Gambit spec the same now.

Thanks, Adam

Re critical sections, do you have primitives in SMP Gambit to force the compiler to respect them, and then in the code output produce assembly instructions that honor them?

Today in SMP Gambit, I presume thread-send/receive and mutex-lock/unlock will abstract away the underlying architecture's memory model, and ensure that thread-receive will have access to the whole structure that thread-send sent.

Example:

GVM processor A:

(thread-send B (list 1 2))

(define l (list 3 4)) (set-car! l 5) (thread-send B (list 1 2))

GVM processor B: (let loop () (for-each print (thread-receive) (loop))

This is to illustrate that thread-send/receive ensures that the list elements will be accessible (= read correctly) at the receiving site. In this case on any architecture, four print calls are done, each with the respectove argument: 1, 2, 5, 4.

I guess that design feature is helped by that the Gambit compiler will not do optimizations that garble the code order, over module-external procedure calls, and thread-send/receive & mutex-lock/unlock count as procedures.

I presume on strongly ordered architectures the following will make 2 3 go through:

GVM processor A: (define l (list 1 2)) (thread-send B l) (set-car! l 3)

GVM processor B: (define m (thread-receive)) (let loop ((i 0)) (if (not (eqv? (expt 3 12) i)) (loop (+ i 1))) (for-each print m)

On a weakly ordered architecture the code would not SIGSEGV nor throw exception, but the first value could be 1 or 3.

Importantly on a weakly ordered architecture the code would never cause a SIGSEGV, because Gambit's memory management ensures that pending memory bus transactions are flushed before it initiates collection of a dead object.

Similarly any allocated object's space is immediately accessible on all cores:

Common workup: (define s #f)

GVM processor A: (set! s (make-u8vector 5))

GVM processor B: (let loop () (let ((v s)) (if v (##u8vector-ref v 1)) (loop))

The promise is limited to that the content is accessible only though - on a weakly ordered architecture, it may not have been initialized yet and therefore the type and range check in (u8vector-ref v 1) could fail, (##u8vector-ref v 1) do not do that though and while it may return junk, at least it will not crash.

The above two described behaviors are is in symmetry with any host OS' malloc/free.

Important references:

Sutter slides:https://1drv.ms/b/s!Aq0V7yDPsIZOgcI0y2P8R-VifbnTtw

Sutter videos: https://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Going+Deep/Cpp-and-Beyond-2012-Herb-Sutter-a... / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8eCGOqgvH4 and https://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Going+Deep/Cpp-and-Beyond-2012-Herb-Sutter-a... / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KeLBd2EJLOU