JavaMemoryModel: Procedural questions

From: victor.luchangco@sun.com
Date: Thu Jul 31 2003 - 01:50:21 EDT


I have several "procedural" questions:

 - What do we actually need to have by Friday?

 - How much can we tweak whatever comes out on Friday, and how does
  that change as we approach September 8? (I believe Sept 8 is the
  deadline for beginning public review, or something like that.)

 - Similarly, what do we need to have by September 8, and how much
  can that be tweaked, and until when?

I hope that we don't have to have a full final draft of a model that
we expect to remain largely unchanged before being voted on (or acted
on in whatever way these things are handled). If we do, I think there
is little hope to have that.

Assuming we have a bit (but not much) more flexibility, it seems like
there are three sets of things to do (not counting the interrupt
exception handling issues being discussed in another thread of this
mailing list):

1. Fix up the Manson-Pugh specification by giving a full formalization
  of the model (or at least one that someone other than Bill or Jeremy
  feels confident of being able to fill in all the details, if it were
  necessary), and an informal description that we can agree captures
  our intuitive understanding of the model (regardless of whether we
  like what the model does or does not guarantee).

2. Augment the Adve model to handle final fields, wait sets and
  notification, etc. as in the Manson-Pugh chapter. I have no idea
  how hard this will be, or even what is involved. (I still have a
  few questions about Sarita's model, esp. the version with CnC-like
  guarantees, but I'm fairly confident that, if necessary, I could
  resolve these questions satisfactorily.)

3. Decide on what guarantees we want to provide, strong CnC-like
  guarantees or weaker ones, and on what basis.

Obviously, only one of 1 and 2 need to be done, and both could be
replaced by yet another proposed formalism. But it seems for now
there is not agreement to abandon either direction.

Is there something else that needs to be done that I missed? In any
case, how will a decision be made about what finally gets proposed
on Friday (or whenever)?

                                   Victor
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