The notion of "in program order" is interesting. Is it fair to say that the burden is on the programmer to write race-condition free software, but within each sequential program read after write and write after write must perform as expected?
krillfish
I think that's a fair assumption. There's not much the hardware can do to prevent race conditions that the programmer introduces into the program. If the programmer reads A, which has 0 twice, and then writes A+1 into A twice after reading, A will have 1. However, the reads and the writes should do what is expected given the reads and writes.
MaxFlowMinCut
I don't think there's any concept of a (software level) race condition to the hardware. For example, if the programmer writes code that doesn't properly lock a variable in a critical region and multiple threads are performing all sorts of interleaved reads and writes, as long as those reads see the latest write (even though it's a logical bug on the software level), the hardware is correctly providing its part of the contract to return the value of the latest rate to any read.
The notion of "in program order" is interesting. Is it fair to say that the burden is on the programmer to write race-condition free software, but within each sequential program read after write and write after write must perform as expected?
I think that's a fair assumption. There's not much the hardware can do to prevent race conditions that the programmer introduces into the program. If the programmer reads A, which has 0 twice, and then writes A+1 into A twice after reading, A will have 1. However, the reads and the writes should do what is expected given the reads and writes.
I don't think there's any concept of a (software level) race condition to the hardware. For example, if the programmer writes code that doesn't properly lock a variable in a critical region and multiple threads are performing all sorts of interleaved reads and writes, as long as those reads see the latest write (even though it's a logical bug on the software level), the hardware is correctly providing its part of the contract to return the value of the latest rate to any read.