RE: [PATCH] eal: introduce atomics abstraction

["Morten Brørup" <mb@smartsharesystems.com>]

> From: Honnappa Nagarahalli [mailto:Honnappa.Nagarahalli@arm.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, 1 February 2023 02.08
> 
> > From: Thomas Monjalon <thomas@monjalon.net>
> > Sent: Tuesday, January 31, 2023 4:42 PM
> >
> > Honnappa, please could you give your view on the future of atomics in
> DPDK?
> Thanks Thomas, apologies it has taken me a while to get to this
> discussion.
> 
> IMO, we do not need DPDK's own abstractions. APIs from stdatomic.h
> (stdatomics as is called here) already serve the purpose. These APIs
> are well understood and documented.
> 
> For environments where stdatomics are not supported, we could have a
> stdatomic.h in DPDK implementing the same APIs (we have to support only
> _explicit APIs). This allows the code to use stdatomics APIs and when
> we move to minimum supported standard C11, we just need to get rid of
> the file in DPDK repo.

I agree with Honnappa.

DPDK should include a shim to expose the C11 stdatomic.h API for environments not already having the C11 stdatomic.h.

With this, DPDK steps outside its native rte_ prefixed namespace, but it should not collide with anyone else's namespace.

It could collide with someone else's namespace if the application implements a similar shim. We cannot prevent this from happening, but if it does, it should be fixed in the application.

> 
> >
> >
> > 12/01/2023 22:26, Tyler Retzlaff:
> > > Introduce atomics abstraction that permits optional use of standard
> > > C11 atomics when meson is provided the new enable_stdatomics=true
> > option.
> > >
> > > Signed-off-by: Tyler Retzlaff <roretzla@linux.microsoft.com>