Yes, I took a rather restricted view.
I was talking (and thinking) about the bus transactions, not machine 
language (or some even higher language constructs).

	Johnny

der Mouse wrote:
> [top-posting damage repaired manually -dM]
> 
> 
>>>>You don't need locked bus cycles for atomic operations which
>>>>actually are atomic on the bus.
>>>>A write is a write is a write.  It can never be split.  It's
>>>>atomic.  Can't be anything else.
>>>
>>>What if it's doing a write across a page boundary, and the second
>>>page isn't there?
>>
>>How could it do that?  A write is a write is a write.
> 
> 
> Not quite.  First, on an architecture that does unaligned accesses, a
> write at the machine-language level can turn into something
> significantly more complicated at the bus level.  Second....
> 
> 
>>One write is one bus cycle.  It's always aligned, and the full width
>>of the bus.
> 
> 
> ...you have a remarkably restricted view of how memory systems operate.
> 
> 
>>Otherwise we're talking about the CPU doing a non-aligned write,
>>which is a read-modify-write.
> 
> 
> Which can be, depending on the CPU and in some cases the surrounding
> electronics.  It could also be a bus write cycle with only certain byte
> lanes enabled.  It could probably also be other things, if, for
> examnple, the memory subsystem uses a narrower bus than the write width
> (eg, a 68k or i386 doing a 32-bit write in a system with a 16-bit
> memory bus).
> 
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-- 
Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
                                   ||  on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt@update.uu.se           ||  Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                     ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol