Issues were noted by Bruce Evans and are present on all architectures.
On i386, a counter fetch should use atomic read of 64bit value,
otherwise carry from the increment on other CPU could be lost for the
given fetch, making error of 2^32. If 64bit read (cmpxchg8b) is not
available on the machine, it cannot be SMP and it is enough to disable
preemption around read to avoid the split read.
On x86 the counter increment is not atomic on purpose, which makes it
possible for the store of the incremented result to override just
zeroed per-cpu slot. The effect would be a counter going off by
arbitrary value after zeroing. Perform the counter zeroing on the
same processor which does the increments, making the operations
mutually exclusive. On i386, same as for the fetching, if the
cmpxchg8b is not available, machine is not SMP and we disable
preemption for zeroing.
PowerPC64 is treated the same as amd64.
For other architectures, the changes made to allow the compilation to
succeed, without fixing the issues with zeroing or fetching. It
should be possible to handle them by using the 64bit loads and stores
atomic WRT preemption (assuming the architectures also converted from
using critical sections to proper asm). If architecture does not
provide the facility, using global (spin) mutex would be non-optimal
but working solution.
Noted by: bde
Sponsored by: The FreeBSD Foundation
Introduce counter(9) API, that implements fast and raceless counters,
provided (but not limited to) for gathering of statistical data.
See http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-arch/2013-April/014204.html
for more details.
In collaboration with: kib
Reviewed by: luigi
Tested by: ae, ray
Sponsored by: Nginx, Inc.
