On Fri, 2006-04-21 at 18:22 +0200, Jens-Heiner Rechtien wrote: > I can't see what we could do about the costs of the "lock" instruction > on x86. I mean, if we need an atomic increment/decrement for our > reference counter we can't work with non-atomic instructions here, > especially now when multi-processor/multi-core PCs are entering the > mainstream.
There are still a lot of people using older x86 machines. Can't you check the system processor mask on startup and have your inlined asm conditionally run locked or non-locked instructions accordingly. The overhead of the test is still much much less than the lock overhead on uni-processor systems. This is what I've done in pthreads-win32 and it seems to work in practise. Nobody has complained or suggested that the concept is invalid. Ross --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
