Subj : Re: YALFAm (Yet Another Lock Free Approach, maybe)
To   : comp.programming.threads
From : Uenal Mutlu
Date : Sun May 15 2005 03:06 pm

"Chris Thomasson" wrote
> > I have an idea about a 'mainly' lock free implementation that I'd
> > appreciate comments on.
> > I'm attempting to solve the same sort of problem as Joe Seigh's atomic_ptr
> > (http://atomic-ptr-plus.sourceforge.net/), but in a way that will work on
> > win64 and win32 (so I want to avoid assembly and reliance on instructions
> > that are not present on some processors).
>
> You can create a single-word atomic reference counted pointer with SMR that
> can outperform ( totally ia-32 specific ) atomic_ptr on x86; 'lock
> cmpxchg8b' can be expensive. SMR based reference counting doesn't have to
> rely on the hefty lock prefix on x86, it can use the "more" lightweight
> mfence instruction...

But in other discussions people had reported that mfence does not
work on AMD or some other Intel CPUs. Were these issues solved
in the meantime?

.