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the memory model we use internally for atomics permits plain loads of
values which may be subject to concurrent modification without
requiring that a special load function be used. since a compiler is
free to make transformations that alter the number of loads or the way
in which loads are performed, the compiler is theoretically free to
break this usage. the most obvious concern is with atomic cas
constructs: something of the form tmp=*p;a_cas(p,tmp,f(tmp)); could be
transformed to a_cas(p,*p,f(*p)); where the latter is intended to show
multiple loads of *p whose resulting values might fail to be equal;
this would break the atomicity of the whole operation. but even more
fundamental breakage is possible.
with the changes being made now, objects that may be modified by
atomics are modeled as volatile, and the atomic operations performed
on them by other threads are modeled as asynchronous stores by
hardware which happens to be acting on the request of another thread.
such modeling of course does not itself address memory synchronization
between cores/cpus, but that aspect was already handled. this all
seems less than ideal, but it's the best we can do without mandating a
C11 compiler and using the C11 model for atomics.
in the case of pthread_once_t, the ABI type of the underlying object
is not volatile-qualified. so we are assuming that accessing the
object through a volatile-qualified lvalue via casts yields volatile
access semantics. the language of the C standard is somewhat unclear
on this matter, but this is an assumption the linux kernel also makes,
and seems to be the correct interpretation of the standard.
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a_store is only valid for int, but ssize_t may be defined as long or
another type. since there is no valid way for another thread to acess
the return value without first checking the error/completion status of
the aiocb anyway, an atomic store is not necessary.
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previously, aio operations were not tracked by file descriptor; each
operation was completely independent. this resulted in non-conforming
behavior for non-seekable/append-mode writes (which are required to be
ordered) and made it impossible to implement aio_cancel, which in turn
made closing file descriptors with outstanding aio operations unsafe.
the new implementation is significantly heavier (roughly twice the
size, and seems to be slightly slower) and presently aims mainly at
correctness, not performance.
most of the public interfaces have been moved into a single file,
aio.c, because there is little benefit to be had from splitting them.
whenever any aio functions are used, aio_cancel and the internal
queue lifetime management and fd-to-queue mapping code must be linked,
and these functions make up the bulk of the code size.
the close function's interaction with aio is implemented with weak
alias magic, to avoid pulling in heavy aio cancellation code in
programs that don't use aio, and the expensive cancellation path
(which includes signal blocking) is optimized out when there are no
active aio queues.
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