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Things You Never Wanted to Know about Memory Fences (But were afraid would be explained to you anyway)

Why study fences on an x86, other than to satisfy one’s curiosity? One reason is that, even when you program in a higher-level language (C++ included), you want to know a bit of assembly to understand some of the tradeoffs. The other is to fight the temptation to do low-level concurrency tricks. If you don’t appreciate the complexities of even the simplest relaxed memory model, that of the x86, you may be tempted to join the dark side—to feel the power of lock-free programming.

I’ll analyze a simple algorithm, the Peterson lock, which, unlike the double-checked locking pattern, will not work on an x86 multicore without actual fences. I’ll show how Java and C++0x deal with this problem.

Bio

Bartosz Milewski has a Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics. He published several papers on Quantum Gravity and String Theory before he switched to programming and Computer Science. He was project lead for the Microsoft search engine before the Internet explosion. He published a book, C++ In Action. Bartosz keeps up with the latest developments in CS by attending graduate courses and seminars at the UW. He actively works on the design of the D language.

Resources

Download the slides of the presentation.