Having linking problems with atomic_inc(), atomic_dec_and_test() in user app, help!

[Kevin B. Hendricks]

Hi,

There are a number of places you can get atomic increment and decrement
code:

1. borrow the implementations from the kernel

2. look at www.openOffice.org CVS sal/osl/unx/interlck.c
    for atomic increment and decrement code for both x86 linux and ppc
    linux, and the proper includes for Solaris.

3. adapt the code from
glibc-2.2.4/linuxthreads/sysdeps/powerpc/pt-machine.h for "compare
_and_swap" and "test_and_set" t do your own "dec_and_test"

4. simply use a pthread mutex to protect the counter (complete overkill)

5. look at the implementations of these synchronization functions in the
IBM/Motorola PowerPC Microprocessor Family: The Programming Environment"
manual (available as a pdf from the Motorola site).  They have
implementations for "Fetch and Add", "Test and Set" , "Compare and Swap"
"Lock Acquisition and Release" and "List Insertion"

I personally recommend using the code from interlck.c from OpenOffice as
your guide and falling back to using a mutex to protect the count for
unknown processors.  That way it will always work but if performance is an
issue, someone can add the support for other processors.  This is what
OpenOffice does for its refernce counted strings.

Hope this helps,

Kevin


On January 4, 2002 12:00, jaf wrote:
> Hi Michael,
>
> >> Also, what does "relocation truncated to fit: R_PPC_REL24
>
> atomic_inc(atomic_t
>
> >> *)" mean?
> >
> >About as much as 'unresolved external reference'. atomic_inc isn't
>
> defined
>
> >in the scope of your code. Look at the kernel headers; it might be
>
> inside
>
> >#ifdef __KRENEL__ (actually it is).
>
> I see... when I wrote the code using Red Hat, this was not the case.  I
> assumed
> things would be similar under all Linuxes... apparently a bad
> assumption.
>
> >Why do you think you need to use atomic_inc directly instead of some
> >pthreads wrapper?
>
> I wasn't able to find a decent equivalent to atomic_t in the pthreads
> API.
> The closest thing I could see would be to wrap my counter increments/
> decrements in a pthread_mutex_t to serialize them, but creating a
> separate mutex for each atomic counter seems a bit expensive/
> inefficient, considering there may be thousands of such atomic counters
> active at once.  Is there some other way to use pthreads to get an
> atomic counter?  Or is a pthread_mutex_t really efficient enough to
> make a decent atomic counter out of?  Or do I need to redesign how my
> application works, because there is no good way to do a cheap, portable
> user-land atomic counter under Linux?  :^(

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