Re: mutexes, locks and so on...

[Alan Barrett <apb%cequrux.com@localhost>]

Please could somebody on the "eat your CAS whether you like it or not"
side of the fence explain why the following idea would not work:

On Sat, 13 Nov 2010, der Mouse wrote:
> Consider this hypothetical:
> 
> x86 does #define ATOMIC_OPS_USE_CAS and defines a CAS(); MI code
> notices this and defines all the higher-level primitives (if that's not
> too much of an oxymoron) in terms of CAS().
> 
> ppc, arm, all the arches sufficiently "modern" to have CAS, likewise.
> 
> Arches without a sufficiently general CAS[%] do not define
> ATOMIC_OPS_USE_CAS and provides their own implementations of mutexes,
> spinlocks, whatever.

--apb (Alan Barrett)