Comment by tialaramex
7 hours ago
Volatile is a type system hack. They should have done a more principled fix, and certainly modern languages should not act as though "C did it" makes it a good idea.
The reason for the hack is that very early C compilers just always spill, so you can write MMIO driver code by setting a pointer to point at the MMIO hardware and it actually works because every time you change x the CPU instruction performs a memory write.
Once C compilers got some basic optimisations that obvious "clever" trick stops working because the compiler can see that we're just modifying x over, and over and over, and so it doesn't spill x from a register and the driver doesn't work properly. C's "volatile" keyword is a hack saying "OK compiler, forget that optimisation" which was presumably a few minutes work to implement, whereas the correct fix, providing MMIO intrinsics in the associated library, was a lot of work.
Why should you want intrinsics here? Intrinsics let you actually spell out what's possible and what isn't. On some targets we can actually do a 1-byte 2-byte and 4-byte write, those are distinct operations and the hardware knows, so e.g. maybe some device expects a 4-byte RGBA write and so if you emit four 1-byte writes that's very confusing and maybe it doesn't work, don't do that. On some targets bit-level writes are available, you can say OK, MMIO write to bit 4 of address 0x1234 and it will write a single bit. If you only have volatile there's no way to know what happens or what it means.
I agree that marking the read/write as special rather than the variable itself would be nice, although it would also be nice if C/C++ was more consistent in the way things like this are done. Maybe given std::atomic and std::mutex as template/library features, supported by compiler intrinsics, it would be nice to have "volatile" supported in a similar way.
As a nit pick, I don't think this is correct use of "spill". Register spilling refers to when a compiler's code generator runs out of registers and needs to store variables in memory instead. In the MMIO case you are reading/writing via a pointer, so this is unrelated to registers and spilling behavior.
That's fair that "spill" probably isn't quite the right word.
By MMIO semantics do you mean explicit load and store instructions? I’ve never felt that pointer reads or writes were lacking descriptiveness here. I would argue the only surprising thing is that they might be optimized out (which is what volatile prevents).
Volatile on a non pointer value is not for MMIO, though, that’s typically for concurrency like with interrupts.
Yeah, it's also cleaner to be able to mark particular reads and writes as having side effects as opposed to having it be a property of the variable.
Thr Linux kernel uses READ_ONCE and WEITE_ONCE which look like actual function calls which is very sensible.
> The reason for the hack is that very early C compilers just always spill, so you can write MMIO driver code by setting a pointer to point at the MMIO hardware and it actually works because every time you change x the CPU instruction performs a memory write.
Source?
This is one of those "everyone doing this kind of work knows" that's rather hard to source, but: this is basically the point of volatile. Especially for reads rather than writes, where you may want to read some location that is being written into by a different piece of hardware.
People used to use it for thread synchronization before proper memory barrier primitives (see https://mariadb.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/2017-11-Memor... ) were available. It was not entirely reliable for this purpose.
Source for what? The volatile keyword is explicitly telling the compiler "don't optimize read/write to this memory location". That's the whole point. Its use for manipulating hardware registers is covered in any intro embedded systems course. I don't know the history of C compilers but it would seem reasonable to assume that compilers started out plainly translating the C to machine code. Optimization would have happened later as the compilers became more mature.
https://www.gnu.org/software/c-intro-and-ref/manual/html_nod...