RE: JavaMemoryModel: Fairness Guarantees in the Memory Model?

From: Doug Lea (dl@cs.oswego.edu)
Date: Mon Oct 22 2001 - 19:40:34 EDT


Hans wrote:
> I would look at the issue differently:
>
> Volatile reads can only be hoisted out of loops if doing so is not
> observable. This can happen for example if the JVM can prove that the
> variable is never concurrently written. That may happen if the code writing
> it can provable never be executed. And that might happen because we have a
> scheduler that never preempts a running thread. It's not at all clear to me
> that the semantics needs to talk about any of this; hoisting the volatile
> was legal only because it was invisible. I think this needs to be reflected
> in the semantics only in that runnable threads are not guaranteed to make
> progress, at least not if there is another runnable thread.

I now see that Hans is right: There is no need to mention hoisting in
this JSR.

If there is ever a JSR on revising scheduling specs in Java, it will
need to address JMM aspects though.

Also, it looks like the Real-Time spec (RTSJ JSR-1) which does specify
scheduling, will need to deal with this issue separately.

-- 
Doug Lea, Computer Science Department, SUNY Oswego, Oswego, NY 13126 USA
dl@cs.oswego.edu 315-312-2688 FAX:315-312-5424 http://gee.cs.oswego.edu/  
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