The memory barrier prevents the compiler from changing the program order
of memory accesses in such a way that accesses to the guarded resource
get outside the guarded stage. As cmpxchg() defines the start of the
guarded stage it also represents an effective memory barrier.
On x86, the architecture ensures to not reorder writes with older reads,
writes to memory with other writes (except in cases that are not
relevant for our locks), or read/write instructions with I/O
instructions, locked instructions, and serializing instructions.
However on ARM, the architectural memory model allows not only that
memory accesses take local effect in another order as their program
order but also that different observers (components that can access
memory like data-busses, TLBs and branch predictors) observe these
effects each in another order. Thus, a correct program order isn't
sufficient for a correct observation order. An additional architectural
preservation of the memory barrier is needed to achieve this.
Fixes#692
The weak implementation was added for quite special purposes years ago
and is no longer needed. On the other hand, the weak attribute does not
help if the implementation ends up in a shared library, which first
resolves symbols locally before asking ldso (that includes the acutal
thread library) *shiver*
When a page fault cannot be resolved, the GDB monitor can get a hint about
which thread faulted by evaluating the thread state object returned by
'Cpu_session::state()'. Unfortunately, with the current implementation,
the signal which informs GDB monitor about the page fault is sent before
the thread state object of the faulted thread has been updated, so it
can happen that the faulted thread cannot be determined immediately
after receiving the signal.
With this commit, the thread state gets updated before the signal is sent.
At least on base-nova it can also happen that the thread state is not
accessible yet after receiving the page fault notification. For this
reason, GDB monitor needs to retry its query until the state is
accessible.
Fixes#1206.
This patch changes the top-level directory layout as a preparatory
step for improving the tools for managing 3rd-party source codes.
The rationale is described in the issue referenced below.
Issue #1082
