[Small-cl-src-discuss] simple locking retry

[Randall Randall]

On Jun 27, 2004, at 4:44 PM, Nathan Froyd wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 27, 2004 at 02:36:06PM -0400, Randall Randall wrote:
>> On Jun 27, 2004, at 8:58 AM, Joe Marshall wrote:
>>> This isn't thread safe.  If two processes attempted to enter the 
>>> queue
>>> simultaneously, one could get lost.
>>
>> Because the second could run between evaluation of
[the contents of]
>> ,queue and evaluation of APPEND?  Okay.  Is there
>> an atomic way to do that append such that it is
>> thread safe without using specialized machinery not
>> available with serve-event?
>
> CMUCL under x86 supports several "set place atomically" primitives
> that use the processor's cmpxchg instruction to provide true
> atomicity.  (apropos "ATOMIC-") to have a peek at what's there.
> Since you're on PPC, this may not help that much...

My current method of dealing with the differences of CMUCL
on PPC and x86 is to use serve-event on CMUCL, so that I
have only one kind of difference (MP vs. non-MP).  Given
that I'm using serve-event, in which control must be explicitly
passed, I shouldn't need any further effort to be effectively
atomic on CMUCL.  I would have preferred to have a single
operation I could do on all CLs that would guarantee atomicity
of an operation whether or not multiprocessing was involved,
but I understand that it isn't covered by ANSI.  The thread-safe
(I think) version of ENQUEUE is:

(defmacro enqueue (queue)
   "Appends a unique ID to a queue."
   (let ((id (gensym)))
     `(let ((,id (gensym)))
        #+(and acl-compat (not allegro) (not cmu))
        (ACL-COMPAT.MP:without-interrupts (setf ,queue (append ,queue 
(list ,id))))
        #+allegro
        (MP:without-interrupts (setf ,queue (append ,queue (list ,id))))
        #+cmu
        (setf ,queue (append ,queue (list ,id)))
        ,id)))

--
Randall Randall
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