Rich Felker
df37d3960a
these functions need to be fast when the init routine has already run, since they may be called very often from code which depends on global initialization having taken place. as such, a fast path bypassing atomic cas on the once control object was used to avoid heavy memory contention. however, on archs with weakly ordered memory, the fast path failed to ensure that the caller actually observes the side effects of the init routine. preliminary performance testing showed that simply removing the fast path was not practical; a performance drop of roughly 85x was observed with 20 threads hammering the same once control on a 24-core machine. so the new explicit barrier operation from atomic.h is used to retain the fast path while ensuring memory visibility. performance may be reduced on some archs where the barrier actually makes a difference, but the previous behavior was unsafe and incorrect on these archs. future improvements to the implementation of a_barrier should reduce the impact.
musl libc
musl, pronounced like the word "mussel", is an MIT-licensed
implementation of the standard C library targetting the Linux syscall
API, suitable for use in a wide range of deployment environments. musl
offers efficient static and dynamic linking support, lightweight code
and low runtime overhead, strong fail-safe guarantees under correct
usage, and correctness in the sense of standards conformance and
safety. musl is built on the principle that these goals are best
achieved through simple code that is easy to understand and maintain.
The 1.1 release series for musl features coverage for all interfaces
defined in ISO C99 and POSIX 2008 base, along with a number of
non-standardized interfaces for compatibility with Linux, BSD, and
glibc functionality.
For basic installation instructions, see the included INSTALL file.
Information on full musl-targeted compiler toolchains, system
bootstrapping, and Linux distributions built on musl can be found on
the project website:
http://www.musl-libc.org/