Thread starvation and resource saturation in atomicity functions?

[Chad Attermann]

"Chad Attermann" <chad@broadmind.com> writes:

> Running at least i486 code would make sense on AMD Opteron processors.  I 
> am shocked that the gcc version shipped by Sun Microsystems would be 
> compiled for i386.  I compiled my own version of gcc 4.2.2 n the same 
> platform and it too appears to have used i386 code.  Perhaps the gcc build 
> configuration process for Solaris is flawed?  Regardless I will be 
> attempting to build a new version today that is forced to use the i486 
> code.  Would apprecite if you have any tips.

My bad... I was mistakenly thinking I needed re-build gcc in order to get 
i486 code.  In reality I should only need to specify the architecture type 
when building my own application using "-march=i486", or perhaps even 
"-march=opteron" in my own case.

As stated in gcc docs, i386 is the default instruction set for "i386 and 
x86-64 family of computers" when the architecture is not explicitly defined, 
so presumably atomic test-and-set operations will use spin-locks by default. 
So I suppose the moral of the story remains... excercise extreme caution 
when using varying thread priorities.

Regards.