Will a memory location be written to within a section of code?

Peter Scott <sketerpot@gmail.com>
Thu, 25 Mar 2010 16:12:16 -0700 (PDT)

          From comp.compilers

Related articles
Will a memory location be written to within a section of code? sketerpot@gmail.com (Peter Scott) (2010-03-25)
Re: Will a memory location be written to within a section of code? gene.ressler@gmail.com (Gene) (2010-03-26)
Re: Will a memory location be written to within a section of code? sketerpot@gmail.com (Peter Scott) (2010-03-28)
Re: Will a memory location be written to within a section of code? jonas.skeppstedt@golfopt.com (Jonas Skeppstedt) (2010-03-30)
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From: Peter Scott <sketerpot@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: comp.compilers
Date: Thu, 25 Mar 2010 16:12:16 -0700 (PDT)
Organization: Compilers Central
Keywords: analysis, question, architecture
Posted-Date: 26 Mar 2010 00:51:56 EDT

I'm working on hardware transactional memory: have start-transaction
and end-transaction instructions, and anything between those
instructions is supposed to either happen atomically or not at all, as
far as other transactions are concerned. A way of speeding up some
forms of HTM is to use a special read-with-intent-to-write-later
instruction for memory reads when I know (or suspect) that the same
memory location will be written to later in the transaction. I want a
compiler to use these special read-with-intent-to-write-later
instructions when appropriate, automatically. For example, in this
code the compiler knows that foo will be written to after it is read:


volatile int foo = 0;
/* ... */
transaction {
    foo = some_function(foo);
}


I want to be able to determine when a memory load will have a
corresponding memory write later within the current transaction. For
cases like the one above, finding this out is trivial: just look for
matched memory loads and stores. But what if the load or store happen
in another function, like a getter/setter method? Like this:


volatile int foo = 0;
int get_foo(void) { return foo; }
void set_foo(int x) { foo = x; }
/* ... */
transaction {
    set_foo(some_function(get_foo()));
}


I don't need to detect all cases, just as many as possible. Is there a
decent way to do this? I'm afraid I'm a newbie to compiler theory, so
if there's a well-established type of analysis that would fit this
problem, just telling me what it's called would be very helpful.


Thanks,
-Peter



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