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I have really simple question. I have simple type variable (like int). I have one process, one writer thread, several "readonly" threads. How should I declare variable?
volatile int
std::atomic<int>
int
I expect that when "writer" thread modifies value all "reader" threads should see fresh value ASAP.
It's ok to read and write variable at the same time, but I expect reader to obtain either old value or new value, not some "intermediate" value.
I'm using single-CPU Xeon E5 v3 machine. I do not need to be portable, I run the code only on this server, i compile with -march=native -mtune=native. Performance is very important so I do not want to add "synchronization overhead" unless absolutely required.
If I just use int and one thread writes value is it possible that in another thread I do not see "fresh" value for a while?
Just use std::atomic.
Don't use volatile, and don't use it as it is; that doesn't give the necessary synchronisation. Modifying it in one thread and accessing it from another without synchronisation will give undefined behaviour.
If you have unsynchronized access to a variable where you have one or more writers then your program has undefined behavior. Some how you have to guarantee that while a write is happening no other write or read can happen. This is called synchronization. How you achieve this synchronization depends on the application.
For something like this where we have one writer and and several readers and are using a TriviallyCopyable datatype then a std::atomic<> will work. The atomic variable will make sure under the hood that only one thread can access the variable at the same time.
If you do not have a TriviallyCopyable type or you do not want to use a std::atomic You could also use a conventional std::mutex and a std::lock_guard to control access
{ // enter locking scope
std::lock_guard lock(mutx); // create lock guard which locks the mutex
some_variable = some_value; // do work
} // end scope lock is destroyed and mutx is released
An important thing to keep in mind with this approach is that you want to keep the // do work section as short as possible as while the mutex is locked no other thread can enter that section.
Another option would be to use a std::shared_timed_mutex(C++14) or std::shared_mutex(C++17) which will allow multiple readers to share the mutex but when you need to write you can still look the mutex and write the data.
You do not want to use volatile to control synchronization as jalf states in this answer:
For thread-safe accesses to shared data, we need a guarantee that:
the read/write actually happens (that the compiler won't just store the value in a register instead and defer updating main memory until
much later)
that no reordering takes place. Assume that we use a volatile variable as a flag to indicate whether or not some data is ready to be
read. In our code, we simply set the flag after preparing the data, so
all looks fine. But what if the instructions are reordered so the flag
is set first?
volatile does guarantee the first point. It also guarantees that no
reordering occurs between different volatile reads/writes. All
volatile memory accesses will occur in the order in which they're
specified. That is all we need for what volatile is intended for:
manipulating I/O registers or memory-mapped hardware, but it doesn't
help us in multithreaded code where the volatile object is often
only used to synchronize access to non-volatile data. Those accesses
can still be reordered relative to the volatile ones.
As always if you measure the performance and the performance is lacking then you can try a different solution but make sure to remeasure and compare after changing.
Lastly Herb Sutter has an excellent presentation he did at C++ and Beyond 2012 called Atomic Weapons that:
This is a two-part talk that covers the C++ memory model, how locks and atomics and fences interact and map to hardware, and more. Even though we’re talking about C++, much of this is also applicable to Java and .NET which have similar memory models, but not all the features of C++ (such as relaxed atomics).
I'll complete a little bit the previous answers.
As exposed previously, just using int or eventually volatile int is not enough for various reason (even with the memory order constraint of Intel processors.)
So, yes, you should use atomic types for that, but you need extra considerations: atomic types guarantee coherent access but if you have visibility concerns you need to specify memory barrier (memory order.)
Barriers will enforce visibility and coherency between threads, on Intel and most modern architectures, it will enforce cache synchronizations so updates are visible for every cores. The problem is that it may be expensive if you're not careful enough.
Possible memory order are:
relaxed: no special barrier, only coherent read/write are enforce;
sequential consistency: strongest possible constraint (the default);
acquire: enforce that no loads after the current one are reordered before and add the required barrier to ensure that released stores are visible;
consume: a simplified version of acquire that mostly only constraint reordering;
release: enforce that all stores before are complete before the current one and that memory writes are done and visible to loads performing an acquire barrier.
So, if you want to be sure that updates to the variable are visible to readers, you need to flag your store with a (at least) a release memory order and, on the reader side you need an acquire memory order (again, at least.) Otherwise, readers may not see the actual version of the integer (it'll see a coherent version at least, that is the old or the new one, but not an ugly mix of the two.)
Of course, the default behavior (full consistency) will also give you the correct behavior, but at the expense of a lot of synchronization. In short, each time you add a barrier it forces cache synchronization which is almost as expensive as several cache misses (and thus reads/writes in main memory.)
So, in short you should declare your int as atomic and use the following code for store and load:
// Your variable
std::atomic<int> v;
// Read
x = v.load(std::memory_order_acquire);
// Write
v.store(x, std::memory_order_release);
And just to complete, sometimes (and more often that you think) you don't really need the sequential consistency (even the partial release/acquire consistency) since visibility of updates are pretty relative. When dealing with concurrent operations, updates take place not when write is performed but when others see the change, reading the old value is probably not a problem !
I strongly recommend reading articles related to relativistic programming and RCU, here are some interesting links:
Relativistic Programming wiki: http://wiki.cs.pdx.edu/rp/
Structured Deferral: Synchronization via Procrastination: https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2488549
Introduction to RCU Concepts: http://www.rdrop.com/~paulmck/RCU/RCU.LinuxCon.2013.10.22a.pdf
Let's start from int at int. In general, when used on single processor, single core machine this should be sufficient, assuming int size same or smaller than CPU word (like 32bit int on 32bit CPU). In this case, assuming correctly aligned address word addresses (high level language should assure this by default) the write/read operations should be atomic. This is guaranteed by Intel as stated in [1] . However, in C++ specification simultaneous reading and writing from different threads is undefined behaviour.
$1.10
6 Two expression evaluations conflict if one of them modifies a memory location (1.7) and the other one accesses or modifies the same memory location.
Now volatile. This keyword disables almost every optimization. This is the reason why it was used. For example, sometimes when optimizing the compiler can come to idea, that variable you only read in one thread is constant there and simply replace it with it's initial value. This solves such problems. However, it does not make access to variable atomic. Also, in most cases, it is simply unnecessary, because use of proper multithreading tools, like mutex or memory barrier, will achieve same effect as volatile on it's own, as described for instance in [2]
While this may be sufficient for most uses, there are other operations that are not guaranteed to be atomic. Like incrementation is a one. This is when std::atomic comes in. It has those operations defined, like here for mentioned incrementations in [3]. It is also well defined when reading and writing from different threads [4].
In addition, as stated in answers in [5], there exists a lot of other factors that may influence (negatively) atomicity of operations. From loosing cache coherency between multiple cores to some hardware details are the factors that may change how operations are performed.
To summarize, std::atomic is created to support accesses from different threads and it is highly recommended to use it when multithreading.
[1] http://www.intel.com/Assets/PDF/manual/253668.pdf see section 8.1.1.
[2] https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/volatile-considered-harmful.txt
[3] http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/atomic/atomic/operator_arith
[4] http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/atomic/atomic
[5] Are C++ Reads and Writes of an int Atomic?
The other answers, which say to use atomic and not volatile, are correct when portability matters. If you’re asking this question, and it’s a good question, that’s the practical answer for you, not, “But, if the standard library doesn’t provide one, you can implement a lock-free, wait-free data structure yourself!” Nevertheless, if the standard library doesn’t provide one, you can implement a lock-free data structure yourself that works on a particular compiler and a particular architecture, provided that there’s only one writer. (Also, somebody has to implement those atomic primitives in the standard library.) If I’m wrong about this, I’m sure someone will kindly inform me.
If you absolutely need an algorithm guaranteed to be lock-free on all platforms, you might be able to build one with atomic_flag. If even that doesn’t suffice, and you need to roll your own data structure, you can do that.
Since there’s only one writer thread, your CPU might guarantee that certain operations on your data will still work atomically even if you just use normal accesses instead of locks or even compare-and-swaps. This is not safe according to the language standard, because C++ has to work on architectures where it isn’t, but it can be safe, for example, on an x86 CPU if you guarantee that the variable you’re updating fits into a single cache line that it doesn’t share with anything else, and you might be able to ensure this with nonstandard extensions such as __attribute__ (( aligned (x) )).
Similarly, your compiler might provide some guarantees: g++ in particular makes guarantees about how the compiler will not assume that the memory referenced by a volatile* hasn’t changed unless the current thread could have changed it. It will actually re-read the variable from memory each time you dereference it. That is in no way sufficient to ensure thread-safety, but it can be handy if another thread is updating the variable.
A real-world example might be: the writer thread maintains some kind of pointer (on its own cache line) which points to a consistent view of the data structure that will remain valid through all future updates. It updates its data with the RCU pattern, making sure to use a release operation (implemented in an architecture-specific way) after updating its copy of the data and before making the pointer to that data globally visible, so that any other thread that sees the updated pointer is guaranteed to see the updated data as well. The reader then makes a local copy (not volatile) of the current value of the pointer, getting a view of the data which will stay valid even after the writer thread updates again, and works with that. You want to use volatile on the single variable that notifies the readers of the updates, so they can see those updates even if the compiler “knows” your thread couldn’t have changed it. In this framework, the shared data just needs to be constant, and readers will use the RCU pattern. That’s one of the two ways I’ve seen volatile be useful in the real world (the other being when you don’t want to optimize out your timing loop).
There also needs to be some way, in this scheme, for the program to know when nobody’s using an old view of the data structure any longer. If that’s a count of readers, that count needs to be atomically modified in a single operation at the same time as the pointer is read (so getting the current view of the data structure involves an atomic CAS). Or this might be a periodic tick when all the threads are guaranteed to be done with the data they’re working with now. It might be a generational data structure where the writer rotates through pre-allocated buffers.
Also observe that a lot of things your program might do could implicitly serialize the threads: those atomic hardware instructions lock the processor bus and force other CPUs to wait, those memory fences could stall your threads, or your threads might be waiting in line to allocate memory from the heap.
Unfortunately it depends.
When a variable is read and written in multiple threads, there may be 2 failures.
1) tearing. Where half the data is pre-change and half the data is post change.
2) stale data. Where the data read has some older value.
int, volatile int and std:atomic all don't tear.
Stale data is a different issue. However, all values have existed, can be concieved as correct.
volatile. This tells the compiler neither to cache the data, nor to re-order operations around it. This improves the coherence between threads by ensuring all operations in a thread are either before the variable, at the variable, or after.
This means that
volatile int x;
int y;
y =5;
x = 7;
the instruction for x = 7 will be written after y = 5;
Unfortunately, the CPU is also capable of re-ordering operations. This can mean that another thread sees x ==7 before y =5
std::atomic x; would allow a guarantee that after seeing x==7, another thread would see y ==5. (Assuming other threads are not modifying y)
So all reads of int, volatile int, std::atomic<int> would show previous valid values of x. Using volatile and atomic increase the ordering of values.
See kernel.org barriers
I have simple type variable (like int).
I have one process, one writer thread, several "readonly" threads. How
should I declare variable?
volatile int
std::atomic
int
Use std::atomic with memory_order_relaxed for the store and load
It's quick, and from your description of your problem, safe. E.g.
void func_fast()
{
std::atomic<int> a;
a.store(1, std::memory_order_relaxed);
}
Compiles to:
func_fast():
movl $1, -24(%rsp)
ret
This assumes you don't need to guarantee that any other data is seen to be written before the integer is updated, and therefore the slower and more complicated synchronisation is unnecessary.
If you use the atomic naively like this:
void func_slow()
{
std::atomic<int> b;
b = 1;
}
You get an MFENCE instruction with no memory_order* specification which is massive slower (100 cycles more more vs just 1 or 2 for the bare MOV).
func_slow():
movl $1, -24(%rsp)
mfence
ret
See http://goo.gl/svPpUa
(Interestingly on Intel the use of memory_order_release and _acquire for this code results in the same assembly language. Intel guarantees that writes and reads happen in order when using the standard MOV instruction).
Here is my attempt at bounty:
- a. General answer already given above says 'use atomics'. This is correct answer. volatile is not enough.
-a. If you dislike the answer, and you are on Intel, and you have properly aligned int, and you love unportable solutions, you can do away with simple volatile, using Intel strong memory ordering gurantees.
TL;DR: Use std::atomic<int> with a mutex around it if you read multiple times.
Depends on how strong guarantees you want.
First volatile is a compiler hint and you shouldn't count on it doing something helpful.
If you use int you can suffer for memory aliasing. Say you have something like
struct {
int x;
bool q;
}
Depending on how this is aligned in memory and the exact implementation of CPU and memory bus it's possible that writing to q will actually overwrite x when the page is copied from the cpu cache back to ram. So unless you know how much to allocate around your int it's not guaranteed that your writer will be able to write without being overwritten by some other thread.
Also even if you write you depend on the processor for reloading the data to the cache of other cores so there's no guarantee that your other thread will see a new value.
std::atomic<int> basically guarantees that you will always allocate sufficient memory, properly aligned so that you don't suffer from aliasing. Depending on the memory order requested you will also disable a bunch of optimizations, like caching, so everything will run slightly slower.
This still doesn't grantee that if your read the var multiple times you'll get the value. The only way to do that is to put a mutex around it to block the writer from changing it.
Still better find a library that already solves the problem you have and it has already been tested by others to make sure it works well.
A coworker and I write software for a variety of platforms running on x86, x64, Itanium, PowerPC, and other 10 year old server CPUs.
We just had a discussion about whether mutex functions such as pthread_mutex_lock() ... pthread_mutex_unlock() are sufficient by themselves, or whether the protected variable needs to be volatile.
int foo::bar()
{
//...
//code which may or may not access _protected.
pthread_mutex_lock(m);
int ret = _protected;
pthread_mutex_unlock(m);
return ret;
}
My concern is caching. Could the compiler place a copy of _protected on the stack or in a register, and use that stale value in the assignment? If not, what prevents that from happening? Are variations of this pattern vulnerable?
I presume that the compiler doesn't actually understand that pthread_mutex_lock() is a special function, so are we just protected by sequence points?
Thanks greatly.
Update: Alright, I can see a trend with answers explaining why volatile is bad. I respect those answers, but articles on that subject are easy to find online. What I can't find online, and the reason I'm asking this question, is how I'm protected without volatile. If the above code is correct, how is it invulnerable to caching issues?
Simplest answer is volatile is not needed for multi-threading at all.
The long answer is that sequence points like critical sections are platform dependent as is whatever threading solution you're using so most of your thread safety is also platform dependent.
C++0x has a concept of threads and thread safety but the current standard does not and therefore volatile is sometimes misidentified as something to prevent reordering of operations and memory access for multi-threading programming when it was never intended and can't be reliably used that way.
The only thing volatile should be used for in C++ is to allow access to memory mapped devices, allow uses of variables between setjmp and longjmp, and to allow uses of sig_atomic_t variables in signal handlers. The keyword itself does not make a variable atomic.
Good news in C++0x we will have the STL construct std::atomic which can be used to guarantee atomic operations and thread safe constructs for variables. Until your compiler of choice supports it you may need to turn to the boost library or bust out some assembly code to create your own objects to provide atomic variables.
P.S. A lot of the confusion is caused by Java and .NET actually enforcing multi-threaded semantics with the keyword volatile C++ however follows suit with C where this is not the case.
Your threading library should include the apropriate CPU and compiler barriers on mutex lock and unlock. For GCC, a memory clobber on an asm statement acts as a compiler barrier.
Actually, there are two things that protect your code from (compiler) caching:
You are calling a non-pure external function (pthread_mutex_*()), which means that the compiler doesn't know that that function doesn't modify your global variables, so it has to reload them.
As I said, pthread_mutex_*() includes a compiler barrier, e.g: on glibc/x86 pthread_mutex_lock() ends up calling the macro lll_lock(), which has a memory clobber, forcing the compiler to reload variables.
If the above code is correct, how is it invulnerable to caching
issues?
Until C++0x, it is not. And it is not specified in C. So, it really depends on the compiler. In general, if the compiler does not guarantee that it will respect ordering constraints on memory accesses for functions or operations that involve multiple threads, you will not be able to write multithreaded safe code with that compiler. See Hans J Boehm's Threads Cannot be Implemented as a Library.
As for what abstractions your compiler should support for thread safe code, the wikipedia entry on Memory Barriers is a pretty good starting point.
(As for why people suggested volatile, some compilers treat volatile as a memory barrier for the compiler. It's definitely not standard.)
The volatile keyword is a hint to the compiler that the variable might change outside of program logic, such as a memory-mapped hardware register that could change as part of an interrupt service routine. This prevents the compiler from assuming a cached value is always correct and would normally force a memory read to retrieve the value. This usage pre-dates threading by a couple decades or so. I've seen it used with variables manipulated by signals as well, but I'm not sure that usage was correct.
Variables guarded by mutexes are guaranteed to be correct when read or written by different threads. The threading API is required to ensure that such views of variables are consistent. This access is all part of your program logic and the volatile keyword is irrelevant here.
With the exception of the simplest spin lock algorithm, mutex code is quite involved: a good optimized mutex lock/unlock code contains the kind of code even excellent programmer struggle to understand. It uses special compare and set instructions, manages not only the unlocked/locked state but also the wait queue, optionally uses system calls to go into a wait state (for lock) or wake up other threads (for unlock).
There is no way the average compiler can decode and "understand" all that complex code (again, with the exception of the simple spin lock) no matter way, so even for a compiler not aware of what a mutex is, and how it relates to synchronization, there is no way in practice a compiler could optimize anything around such code.
That's if the code was "inline", or available for analyse for the purpose of cross module optimization, or if global optimization is available.
I presume that the compiler doesn't actually understand that
pthread_mutex_lock() is a special function, so are we just protected
by sequence points?
The compiler does not know what it does, so does not try to optimize around it.
How is it "special"? It's opaque and treated as such. It is not special among opaque functions.
There is no semantic difference with an arbitrary opaque function that can access any other object.
My concern is caching. Could the compiler place a copy of _protected
on the stack or in a register, and use that stale value in the
assignment?
Yes, in code that act on objects transparently and directly, by using the variable name or pointers in a way that the compiler can follow. Not in code that might use arbitrary pointers to indirectly use variables.
So yes between calls to opaque functions. Not across.
And also for variables which can only be used in the function, by name: for local variables that don't have either their address taken or a reference bound to them (such that the compiler cannot follow all further uses). These can indeed be "cached" across arbitrary calls include lock/unlock.
If not, what prevents that from happening? Are variations of this
pattern vulnerable?
Opacity of the functions. Non inlining. Assembly code. System calls. Code complexity. Everything that make compilers bail out and think "that's complicated stuff just make calls to it".
The default position of a compiler is always the "let's execute stupidly I don't understand what is being done anyway" not "I will optimize that/let's rewrite the algorithm I know better". Most code is not optimized in complex non local way.
Now let's assume the absolute worse (from out point of view which is that the compiler should give up, that is the absolute best from the point of view of an optimizing algorithm):
the function is "inline" (= available for inlining) (or global optimization kicks in, or all functions are morally "inline");
no memory barrier is needed (as in a mono-processor time sharing system, and in a multi-processor strongly ordered system) in that synchronization primitive (lock or unlock) so it contains no such thing;
there is no special instruction (like compare and set) used (for example for a spin lock, the unlock operation is a simple write);
there is no system call to pause or wake threads (not needed in a spin lock);
then we might have a problem as the compiler could optimize around the function call. This is fixed trivially by inserting a compiler barrier such as an empty asm statement with a "clobber" for other accessible variables. That means that compiler just assumes that anything that might be accessible to a called function is "clobbered".
or whether the protected variable needs to be volatile.
You can make it volatile for the usual reason you make things volatile: to be certain to be able to access the variable in the debugger, to prevent a floating point variable from having the wrong datatype at runtime, etc.
Making it volatile would actually not even fix the issue described above as volatile is essentially a memory operation in the abstract machine that has the semantics of an I/O operation and as such is only ordered with respect to
real I/O like iostream
system calls
other volatile operations
asm memory clobbers (but then no memory side effect is reordered around those)
calls to external functions (as they might do one the above)
Volatile is not ordered with respect to non volatile memory side effects. That makes volatile practically useless (useless for practical uses) for writing thread safe code in even the most specific case where volatile would a priori help, the case where no memory fence is ever needed: when programming threading primitives on a time sharing system on a single CPU. (That may be one of the least understood aspects of either C or C++.)
So while volatile does prevent "caching", volatile doesn't even prevent compiler reordering of lock/unlock operation unless all shared variables are volatile.
Locks/synchronisation primitives make sure the data is not cached in registers/cpu cache, that means data propagates to memory. If two threads are accessing/ modifying data with in locks, it is guaranteed that data is read from memory and written to memory. We don't need volatile in this use case.
But the case where you have code with double checks, compiler can optimise the code and remove redundant code, to prevent that we need volatile.
Example: see singleton pattern example
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singleton_pattern#Lazy_initialization
Why do some one write this kind of code?
Ans: There is a performance benefit of not accuiring lock.
PS: This is my first post on stack overflow.
Not if the object you're locking is volatile, eg: if the value it represents depends on something foreign to the program (hardware state).
volatile should NOT be used to denote any kind of behavior that is the result of executing the program.
If it's actually volatile what I personally would do is locking the value of the pointer/address, instead of the underlying object.
eg:
volatile int i = 0;
// ... Later in a thread
// ... Code that may not access anything without a lock
std::uintptr_t ptr_to_lock = &i;
some_lock(ptr_to_lock);
// use i
release_some_lock(ptr_to_lock);
Please note that it only works if ALL the code ever using the object in a thread locks the same address. So be mindful of that when using threads with some variable that is part of an API.
As demonstrated in this answer I recently posted, I seem to be confused about the utility (or lack thereof) of volatile in multi-threaded programming contexts.
My understanding is this: any time a variable may be changed outside the flow of control of a piece of code accessing it, that variable should be declared to be volatile. Signal handlers, I/O registers, and variables modified by another thread all constitute such situations.
So, if you have a global int foo, and foo is read by one thread and set atomically by another thread (probably using an appropriate machine instruction), the reading thread sees this situation in the same way it sees a variable tweaked by a signal handler or modified by an external hardware condition and thus foo should be declared volatile (or, for multithreaded situations, accessed with memory-fenced load, which is probably a better a solution).
How and where am I wrong?
The problem with volatile in a multithreaded context is that it doesn't provide all the guarantees we need. It does have a few properties we need, but not all of them, so we can't rely on volatile alone.
However, the primitives we'd have to use for the remaining properties also provide the ones that volatile does, so it is effectively unnecessary.
For thread-safe accesses to shared data, we need a guarantee that:
the read/write actually happens (that the compiler won't just store the value in a register instead and defer updating main memory until much later)
that no reordering takes place. Assume that we use a volatile variable as a flag to indicate whether or not some data is ready to be read. In our code, we simply set the flag after preparing the data, so all looks fine. But what if the instructions are reordered so the flag is set first?
volatile does guarantee the first point. It also guarantees that no reordering occurs between different volatile reads/writes. All volatile memory accesses will occur in the order in which they're specified. That is all we need for what volatile is intended for: manipulating I/O registers or memory-mapped hardware, but it doesn't help us in multithreaded code where the volatile object is often only used to synchronize access to non-volatile data. Those accesses can still be reordered relative to the volatile ones.
The solution to preventing reordering is to use a memory barrier, which indicates both to the compiler and the CPU that no memory access may be reordered across this point. Placing such barriers around our volatile variable access ensures that even non-volatile accesses won't be reordered across the volatile one, allowing us to write thread-safe code.
However, memory barriers also ensure that all pending reads/writes are executed when the barrier is reached, so it effectively gives us everything we need by itself, making volatile unnecessary. We can just remove the volatile qualifier entirely.
Since C++11, atomic variables (std::atomic<T>) give us all of the relevant guarantees.
You might also consider this from the Linux Kernel Documentation.
C programmers have often taken volatile to mean that the variable
could be changed outside of the current thread of execution; as a
result, they are sometimes tempted to use it in kernel code when
shared data structures are being used. In other words, they have been
known to treat volatile types as a sort of easy atomic variable, which
they are not. The use of volatile in kernel code is almost never
correct; this document describes why.
The key point to understand with regard to volatile is that its
purpose is to suppress optimization, which is almost never what one
really wants to do. In the kernel, one must protect shared data
structures against unwanted concurrent access, which is very much a
different task. The process of protecting against unwanted
concurrency will also avoid almost all optimization-related problems
in a more efficient way.
Like volatile, the kernel primitives which make concurrent access to
data safe (spinlocks, mutexes, memory barriers, etc.) are designed to
prevent unwanted optimization. If they are being used properly, there
will be no need to use volatile as well. If volatile is still
necessary, there is almost certainly a bug in the code somewhere. In
properly-written kernel code, volatile can only serve to slow things
down.
Consider a typical block of kernel code:
spin_lock(&the_lock);
do_something_on(&shared_data);
do_something_else_with(&shared_data);
spin_unlock(&the_lock);
If all the code follows the locking rules, the value of shared_data
cannot change unexpectedly while the_lock is held. Any other code
which might want to play with that data will be waiting on the lock.
The spinlock primitives act as memory barriers - they are explicitly
written to do so - meaning that data accesses will not be optimized
across them. So the compiler might think it knows what will be in
shared_data, but the spin_lock() call, since it acts as a memory
barrier, will force it to forget anything it knows. There will be no
optimization problems with accesses to that data.
If shared_data were declared volatile, the locking would still be
necessary. But the compiler would also be prevented from optimizing
access to shared_data within the critical section, when we know that
nobody else can be working with it. While the lock is held,
shared_data is not volatile. When dealing with shared data, proper
locking makes volatile unnecessary - and potentially harmful.
The volatile storage class was originally meant for memory-mapped I/O
registers. Within the kernel, register accesses, too, should be
protected by locks, but one also does not want the compiler
"optimizing" register accesses within a critical section. But, within
the kernel, I/O memory accesses are always done through accessor
functions; accessing I/O memory directly through pointers is frowned
upon and does not work on all architectures. Those accessors are
written to prevent unwanted optimization, so, once again, volatile is
unnecessary.
Another situation where one might be tempted to use volatile is when
the processor is busy-waiting on the value of a variable. The right
way to perform a busy wait is:
while (my_variable != what_i_want)
cpu_relax();
The cpu_relax() call can lower CPU power consumption or yield to a
hyperthreaded twin processor; it also happens to serve as a memory
barrier, so, once again, volatile is unnecessary. Of course,
busy-waiting is generally an anti-social act to begin with.
There are still a few rare situations where volatile makes sense in
the kernel:
The above-mentioned accessor functions might use volatile on
architectures where direct I/O memory access does work. Essentially,
each accessor call becomes a little critical section on its own and
ensures that the access happens as expected by the programmer.
Inline assembly code which changes memory, but which has no other
visible side effects, risks being deleted by GCC. Adding the volatile
keyword to asm statements will prevent this removal.
The jiffies variable is special in that it can have a different value
every time it is referenced, but it can be read without any special
locking. So jiffies can be volatile, but the addition of other
variables of this type is strongly frowned upon. Jiffies is considered
to be a "stupid legacy" issue (Linus's words) in this regard; fixing it
would be more trouble than it is worth.
Pointers to data structures in coherent memory which might be modified
by I/O devices can, sometimes, legitimately be volatile. A ring buffer
used by a network adapter, where that adapter changes pointers to
indicate which descriptors have been processed, is an example of this
type of situation.
For most code, none of the above justifications for volatile apply.
As a result, the use of volatile is likely to be seen as a bug and
will bring additional scrutiny to the code. Developers who are
tempted to use volatile should take a step back and think about what
they are truly trying to accomplish.
I don't think you're wrong -- volatile is necessary to guarantee that thread A will see the value change, if the value is changed by something other than thread A. As I understand it, volatile is basically a way to tell the compiler "don't cache this variable in a register, instead be sure to always read/write it from RAM memory on every access".
The confusion is because volatile isn't sufficient for implementing a number of things. In particular, modern systems use multiple levels of caching, modern multi-core CPUs do some fancy optimizations at run-time, and modern compilers do some fancy optimizations at compile time, and these all can result in various side effects showing up in a different order from the order you would expect if you just looked at the source code.
So volatile is fine, as long as you keep in mind that the 'observed' changes in the volatile variable may not occur at the exact time you think they will. Specifically, don't try to use volatile variables as a way to synchronize or order operations across threads, because it won't work reliably.
Personally, my main (only?) use for the volatile flag is as a "pleaseGoAwayNow" boolean. If I have a worker thread that loops continuously, I'll have it check the volatile boolean on each iteration of the loop, and exit if the boolean is ever true. The main thread can then safely clean up the worker thread by setting the boolean to true, and then calling pthread_join() to wait until the worker thread is gone.
volatile is useful (albeit insufficient) for implementing the basic construct of a spinlock mutex, but once you have that (or something superior), you don't need another volatile.
The typical way of multithreaded programming is not to protect every shared variable at the machine level, but rather to introduce guard variables which guide program flow. Instead of volatile bool my_shared_flag; you should have
pthread_mutex_t flag_guard_mutex; // contains something volatile
bool my_shared_flag;
Not only does this encapsulate the "hard part," it's fundamentally necessary: C does not include atomic operations necessary to implement a mutex; it only has volatile to make extra guarantees about ordinary operations.
Now you have something like this:
pthread_mutex_lock( &flag_guard_mutex );
my_local_state = my_shared_flag; // critical section
pthread_mutex_unlock( &flag_guard_mutex );
pthread_mutex_lock( &flag_guard_mutex ); // may alter my_shared_flag
my_shared_flag = ! my_shared_flag; // critical section
pthread_mutex_unlock( &flag_guard_mutex );
my_shared_flag does not need to be volatile, despite being uncacheable, because
Another thread has access to it.
Meaning a reference to it must have been taken sometime (with the & operator).
(Or a reference was taken to a containing structure)
pthread_mutex_lock is a library function.
Meaning the compiler can't tell if pthread_mutex_lock somehow acquires that reference.
Meaning the compiler must assume that pthread_mutex_lock modifes the shared flag!
So the variable must be reloaded from memory. volatile, while meaningful in this context, is extraneous.
Your understanding really is wrong.
The property, that the volatile variables have, is "reads from and writes to this variable are part of perceivable behaviour of the program". That means this program works (given appropriate hardware):
int volatile* reg=IO_MAPPED_REGISTER_ADDRESS;
*reg=1; // turn the fuel on
*reg=2; // ignition
*reg=3; // release
int x=*reg; // fire missiles
The problem is, this is not the property we want from thread-safe anything.
For example, a thread-safe counter would be just (linux-kernel-like code, don't know the c++0x equivalent):
atomic_t counter;
...
atomic_inc(&counter);
This is atomic, without a memory barrier. You should add them if necessary. Adding volatile would probably not help, because it wouldn't relate the access to the nearby code (eg. to appending of an element to the list the counter is counting). Certainly, you don't need to see the counter incremented outside your program, and optimisations are still desirable, eg.
atomic_inc(&counter);
atomic_inc(&counter);
can still be optimised to
atomically {
counter+=2;
}
if the optimizer is smart enough (it doesn't change the semantics of the code).
For your data to be consistent in a concurrent environment you need two conditions to apply:
1) Atomicity i.e if I read or write some data to memory then that data gets read/written in one pass and cannot be interrupted or contended due to e.g a context switch
2) Consistency i.e the order of read/write ops must be seen to be the same between multiple concurrent environments - be that threads, machines etc
volatile fits neither of the above - or more particularly, the c or c++ standard as to how volatile should behave includes neither of the above.
It's even worse in practice as some compilers ( such as the intel Itanium compiler ) do attempt to implement some element of concurrent access safe behaviour ( i.e by ensuring memory fences ) however there is no consistency across compiler implementations and moreover the standard does not require this of the implementation in the first place.
Marking a variable as volatile will just mean that you are forcing the value to be flushed to and from memory each time which in many cases just slows down your code as you've basically blown your cache performance.
c# and java AFAIK do redress this by making volatile adhere to 1) and 2) however the same cannot be said for c/c++ compilers so basically do with it as you see fit.
For some more in depth ( though not unbiased ) discussion on the subject read this
The comp.programming.threads FAQ has a classic explanation by Dave Butenhof:
Q56: Why don't I need to declare shared variables VOLATILE?
I'm concerned, however, about cases where both the compiler and the
threads library fulfill their respective specifications. A conforming
C compiler can globally allocate some shared (nonvolatile) variable to
a register that gets saved and restored as the CPU gets passed from
thread to thread. Each thread will have it's own private value for
this shared variable, which is not what we want from a shared
variable.
In some sense this is true, if the compiler knows enough about the
respective scopes of the variable and the pthread_cond_wait (or
pthread_mutex_lock) functions. In practice, most compilers will not try
to keep register copies of global data across a call to an external
function, because it's too hard to know whether the routine might
somehow have access to the address of the data.
So yes, it's true that a compiler that conforms strictly (but very
aggressively) to ANSI C might not work with multiple threads without
volatile. But someone had better fix it. Because any SYSTEM (that is,
pragmatically, a combination of kernel, libraries, and C compiler) that
does not provide the POSIX memory coherency guarantees does not CONFORM
to the POSIX standard. Period. The system CANNOT require you to use
volatile on shared variables for correct behavior, because POSIX
requires only that the POSIX synchronization functions are necessary.
So if your program breaks because you didn't use volatile, that's a BUG.
It may not be a bug in C, or a bug in the threads library, or a bug in
the kernel. But it's a SYSTEM bug, and one or more of those components
will have to work to fix it.
You don't want to use volatile, because, on any system where it makes
any difference, it will be vastly more expensive than a proper
nonvolatile variable. (ANSI C requires "sequence points" for volatile
variables at each expression, whereas POSIX requires them only at
synchronization operations -- a compute-intensive threaded application
will see substantially more memory activity using volatile, and, after
all, it's the memory activity that really slows you down.)
/---[ Dave Butenhof ]-----------------------[ butenhof#zko.dec.com ]---\
| Digital Equipment Corporation 110 Spit Brook Rd ZKO2-3/Q18 |
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-----------------[ Better Living Through Concurrency ]----------------/
Mr Butenhof covers much of the same ground in this usenet post:
The use of "volatile" is not sufficient to ensure proper memory
visibility or synchronization between threads. The use of a mutex is
sufficient, and, except by resorting to various non-portable machine
code alternatives, (or more subtle implications of the POSIX memory
rules that are much more difficult to apply generally, as explained in
my previous post), a mutex is NECESSARY.
Therefore, as Bryan explained, the use of volatile accomplishes
nothing but to prevent the compiler from making useful and desirable
optimizations, providing no help whatsoever in making code "thread
safe". You're welcome, of course, to declare anything you want as
"volatile" -- it's a legal ANSI C storage attribute, after all. Just
don't expect it to solve any thread synchronization problems for you.
All that's equally applicable to C++.
This is all that "volatile" is doing:
"Hey compiler, this variable could change AT ANY MOMENT (on any clock tick) even if there are NO LOCAL INSTRUCTIONS acting on it. Do NOT cache this value in a register."
That is IT. It tells the compiler that your value is, well, volatile- this value may be altered at any moment by external logic (another thread, another process, the Kernel, etc.). It exists more or less solely to suppress compiler optimizations that will silently cache a value in a register that it is inherently unsafe to EVER cache.
You may encounter articles like "Dr. Dobbs" that pitch volatile as some panacea for multi-threaded programming. His approach isn't totally devoid of merit, but it has the fundamental flaw of making an object's users responsible for its thread-safety, which tends to have the same issues as other violations of encapsulation.
According to my old C standard, “What constitutes an access to an object that has volatile- qualified type is implementation-defined”. So C compiler writers could have choosen to have "volatile" mean "thread safe access in a multi-process environment". But they didn't.
Instead, the operations required to make a critical section thread safe in a multi-core multi-process shared memory environment were added as new implementation-defined features. And, freed from the requirement that "volatile" would provide atomic access and access ordering in a multi-process environment, the compiler writers prioritised code-reduction over historical implemention-dependant "volatile" semantics.
This means that things like "volatile" semaphores around critical code sections, which do not work on new hardware with new compilers, might once have worked with old compilers on old hardware, and old examples are sometimes not wrong, just old.
I'm writing a C++ app.
I have a class variable that more than one thread is writing to.
In C++, anything that can be modified without the compiler "realizing" that it's being changed needs to be marked volatile right? So if my code is multi threaded, and one thread may write to a var while another reads from it, do I need to mark the var volaltile?
[I don't have a race condition since I'm relying on writes to ints being atomic]
Thanks!
C++ hasn't yet any provision for multithreading. In practice, volatile doesn't do what you mean (it has been designed for memory adressed hardware and while the two issues are similar they are different enough that volatile doesn't do the right thing -- note that volatile has been used in other language for usages in mt contexts).
So if you want to write an object in one thread and read it in another, you'll have to use synchronization features your implementation needs when it needs them. For the one I know of, volatile play no role in that.
FYI, the next standard will take MT into account, and volatile will play no role in that. So that won't change. You'll just have standard defined conditions in which synchronization is needed and standard defined way of achieving them.
Yes, volatile is the absolute minimum you'll need. It ensures that the code generator won't generate code that stores the variable in a register and always performs reads and writes from/to memory. Most code generators can provide atomicity guarantees on variables that have the same size as the native CPU word, they'll ensure the memory address is aligned so that the variable cannot straddle a cache-line boundary.
That is however not a very strong contract on modern multi-core CPUs. Volatile does not promise that another thread that runs on another core can see updates to the variable. That requires a memory barrier, usually an instruction that flushes the CPU cache. If you don't provide a barrier, the thread will in effect keep running until such a flush occurs naturally. That will eventually happen, the thread scheduler is bound to provide one. That can take milliseconds.
Once you've taken care of details like this, you'll eventually have re-invented a condition variable (aka event) that isn't likely to be any faster than the one provided by a threading library. Or as well tested. Don't invent your own, threading is hard enough to get right, you don't need the FUD of not being sure that the very basic primitives are solid.
volatile instruct the compiler not to optimize upon "intuition" of a variable value or usage since it could be optimize "from the outside".
volatile won't provide any synchronization however and your assumption of writes to int being atomic are all but realistic!
I'd guess we'd need to see some usage to know if volatile is needed in your case (or check the behavior of your program) or more importantly if you see some sort of synchronization.
I think that volatile only really applies to reading, especially reading memory-mapped I/O registers.
It can be used to tell the compiler to not assume that once it has read from a memory location that the value won't change:
while (*p)
{
// ...
}
In the above code, if *p is not written to within the loop, the compiler might decide to move the read outside the loop, more like this:
cached_p=*p
while (cached_p)
{
// ...
}
If p is a pointer to a memory-mapped I/O port, you would want the first version where the port is checked before the loop is entered every time.
If p is a pointer to memory in a multi-threaded app, you're still not guaranteed that writes are atomic.
Without locking you may still get 'impossible' re-orderings done by the compiler or processor. And there's no guarantee that writes to ints are atomic.
It would be better to use proper locking.
Volatile will solve your problem, ie. it will guarantee consistency among all the caches of the system. However it will be inefficiency since it will update the variable in memory for each R or W access. You might concider using a memory barrier, only whenever it is needed, instead.
If you are working with or gcc/icc have look on sync built-ins : http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-4.1.2/gcc/Atomic-Builtins.html
EDIT (mostly about pm100 comment):
I understand that my beliefs are not a reference so I found something to quote :)
The volatile keyword was devised to prevent compiler optimizations that might render code incorrect in the presence of certain asynchronous events. For example, if you declare a primitive variable as volatile, the compiler is not permitted to cache it in a register
From Dr Dobb's
More interesting :
Volatile fields are linearizable. Reading a volatile field is like acquiring a lock; the working memory is invalidated and the volatile field's current value is reread from memory. Writing a volatile field is like releasing a lock : the volatile field is immediately written back to memory.
(this is all about consistency, not about atomicity)
from The Art of multiprocessor programming, Maurice Herlihy & Nir Shavit
Lock contains memory synchronization code, if you don't lock, you must do something and using volatile keyword is probably the simplest thing you can do (even if it was designed for external devices with memory binded to the address space, it's not the point here)
I have an application where 2 threads are running... Is there any certanty that when I change a global variable from one thread, the other will notice this change?
I don't have any syncronization or Mutual exclusion system in place... but should this code work all the time (imagine a global bool named dataUpdated):
Thread 1:
while(1) {
if (dataUpdated)
updateScreen();
doSomethingElse();
}
Thread 2:
while(1) {
if (doSomething())
dataUpdated = TRUE;
}
Does a compiler like gcc optimize this code in a way that it doesn't check for the global value, only considering it value at compile time (because it nevers get changed at the same thred)?
PS: Being this for a game-like application, it really doen't matter if there will be a read while the value is being written... all that matters is that the change gets noticed by the other thread.
Yes. No. Maybe.
First, as others have mentioned you need to make dataUpdated volatile; otherwise the compiler may be free to lift reading it out of the loop (depending on whether or not it can see that doSomethingElse doesn't touch it).
Secondly, depending on your processor and ordering needs, you may need memory barriers. volatile is enough to guarentee that the other processor will see the change eventually, but not enough to guarentee that the changes will be seen in the order they were performed. Your example only has one flag, so it doesn't really show this phenomena. If you need and use memory barriers, you should no longer need volatile
Volatile considered harmful and Linux Kernel Memory Barriers are good background on the underlying issues; I don't really know of anything similar written specifically for threading. Thankfully threads don't raise these concerns nearly as often as hardware peripherals do, though the sort of case you describe (a flag indicating completion, with other data presumed to be valid if the flag is set) is exactly the sort of thing where ordering matterns...
Here is an example that uses boost condition variables:
bool _updated=false;
boost::mutex _access;
boost::condition _condition;
bool updated()
{
return _updated;
}
void thread1()
{
boost::mutex::scoped_lock lock(_access);
while (true)
{
boost::xtime xt;
boost::xtime_get(&xt, boost::TIME_UTC);
// note that the second parameter to timed_wait is a predicate function that is called - not the address of a variable to check
if (_condition.timed_wait(lock, &updated, xt))
updateScreen();
doSomethingElse();
}
}
void thread2()
{
while(true)
{
if (doSomething())
_updated=true;
}
}
Use a lock. Always always use a lock to access shared data. Marking the variable as volatile will prevent the compiler from optimizing away the memory read, but will not prevent other problems such as memory re-ordering. Without a lock there is no guarantee that the memory writes in doSomething() will be visible in the updateScreen() function.
The only other safe way is to use a memory fence, either explicitly or an implicitly using an Interlocked* function for example.
Use the volatile keyword to hint to the compiler that the value can change at any time.
volatile int myInteger;
The above will guarantee that any access to the variable will be to and from memory without any specific optimizations and as a result all threads running on the same processor will "see" changes to the variable with the same semantics as the code reads.
Chris Jester-Young pointed out that coherency concerns to such a variable value change may arise in a multi-processor systems. This is a consideration and it depends on the platform.
Actually, there are really two considerations to think about relative to platform. They are coherency and atomicity of the memory transactions.
Atomicity is actually a consideration for both single and multi-processor platforms. The issue arises because the variable is likely multi-byte in nature and the question is if one thread could see a partial update to the value or not. ie: Some bytes changed, context switch, invalid value read by interrupting thread. For a single variable that is at the natural machine word size or smaller and naturally aligned should not be a concern. Specifically, an int type should always be OK in this regard as long as it is aligned - which should be the default case for the compiler.
Relative to coherency, this is a potential concern in a multi-processor system. The question is if the system implements full cache coherency or not between processors. If implemented, this is typically done with the MESI protocol in hardware. The question didn't state platforms, but both Intel x86 platforms and PowerPC platforms are cache coherent across processors for normally mapped program data regions. Therefore this type of issue should not be a concern for ordinary data memory accesses between threads even if there are multiple processors.
The final issue relative to atomicity that arises is specific to read-modify-write atomicity. That is, how do you guarantee that if a value is read updated in value and the written, that this happen atomically, even across processors if more than one. So, for this to work without specific synchronization objects, would require that all potential threads accessing the variable are readers ONLY but expect for only one thread can ever be a writer at one time. If this is not the case, then you do need a sync object available to be able to ensure atomic actions on read-modify-write actions to the variable.
Your solution will use 100% CPU, among other problems. Google for "condition variable".
Chris Jester-Young pointed out that:
This only work under Java 1.5+'s memory model. The C++ standard does not address threading, and volatile does not guarantee memory coherency between processors. You do need a memory barrier for this
being so, the only true answer is implementing a synchronization system, right?
Use the volatile keyword to hint to the compiler that the value can change at any time.
volatile int myInteger;
No, it's not certain. If you declare the variable volatile, then the complier is supposed to generate code that always loads the variable from memory on a read.
If the scope is right ( "extern", global, etc. ) then the change will be noticed. The question is when? And in what order?
The problem is that the compiler can and frequently will re-order your logic to fill all it's concurrent pipelines as a performance optimization.
It doesn't really show in your specific example because there aren't any other instructions around your assignment, but imagine functions declared after your bool assign execute before the assignment.
Check-out Pipeline Hazard on wikipedia or search google for "compiler instruction reordering"
As others have said the volatile keyword is your friend. :-)
You'll most likely find that your code would work when you had all of the optimisation options disabled in gcc. In this case (I believe) it treats everything as volatile and as a result the variable is accessed in memory for every operation.
With any sort of optimisation turned on the compiler will attempt to use a local copy held in a register. Depending on your functions this may mean that you only see the change in variable intermittently or, at worst, never.
Using the keyword volatile indicates to the compiler that the contents of this variable can change at any time and that it should not use a locally cached copy.
With all of that said you may find better results (as alluded to by Jeff) through the use of a semaphore or condition variable.
This is a reasonable introduction to the subject.