In message <E1HR9yM-0001ys-00@smeg.dsg.stanford.edu>,
jonathan@dsg.stanford.edu writes:

quoted text
>
>In message <20070313161735.GA5993@polynum.com>,
>tlaronde@polynum.com writes:
>
>>On Tue, Mar 13, 2007 at 08:26:51AM -0700, Jason Thorpe wrote:
>[...]
>>>
>>> Hm, if it is compare-and-swap, then great... but I thought it was  
>>> compare-and-set.  Anyway, if you could double-check for me, that would  
>>> be great -- m68k is one of the platforms I was thinking of when I went  
>>> with "compare-and-store"
>>
>>cas is "compare and swap" from Solaris Internals, second edition, page
>>820.
>
>CAS meaning "compare and swap" goes back to the IBM 370.  Usage on
>sparcv9 and 68040+ is, IIRC, compatible.
>
>The three arguments are: address, expected value, new value.  The
>value at the address is atomically overwritten by the new value if and
>only if the value at the address (atomically) matches the expected value.
>
>CAS with boolean result (swapped, or not) lets algorithm designers
>refetch the current value and restart their atomic operation. You
>don't strictly need to atomically return the old value when it differs
>from the expected value.
>
>Typically, effort goes into avoiding the so-called "A/B/A" problem,
>where one thread reads value A at address L, a second thread reads A
>from L, modifies L to B, and then back to A; whereupon the first
>thread reads "A" (with a CAS) and presume that the location value
>hasn' changed since its prior read.  (Consider "A" being a pointer
>which has been freed, then reallocated as an object of a different type).
>
>But for data structures with simple semantics like counters,
>that doesn't matter.
>