Re: Singleton_pattern and Thread Safety

From:
James Kanze <james.kanze@gmail.com>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++
Date:
Mon, 13 Dec 2010 02:48:22 -0800 (PST)
Message-ID:
<99d6f50b-f4a2-47df-ba53-eacb2889a106@y3g2000vbm.googlegroups.com>
On Dec 11, 4:05 pm, "Chris M. Thomasson" <cris...@charter.net> wrote:

"Leigh Johnston" <le...@i42.co.uk> wrote in message

news:kY-dnahdNL25H57QnZ2dnUVZ7vOdnZ2d@giganews.com...
[...]

Hmm, I think I see why I might need the first barrier: is it
due to loads being made from the singleton object before the
pointer check causing problems for *clients* of the
function? any threading experts care to explain?


http://lwn.net/Articles/5159

http://mirror.linux.org.au/linux-mandocs/2.6.4-cset-20040312_2111/rea...

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.c++.moderated/msg/e500c3b8b6...

Basically, the only architecture out there which requires
a data-dependant acquire barrier after the initial atomic load
of the shared instance pointer is a DEC Alpha...


You must know something I don't: the documentation of the Sparc
architecture definitely says that it isn't guaranteed; I've also
heard that it fails on Itaniums, and that it is uncertain on
80x86. (My own reading of the Intel documentation fails to turn
up a guarantee, but I've not seen everything.)

--
James Kanze

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