Atomic swap in GNU C++
- by Steve
I want to verify that my understanding is correct. This kind of thing is tricky so I'm almost sure I am missing something. I have a program consisting of a real-time thread and a non-real-time thread. I want the non-RT thread to be able to swap a pointer to memory that is used by the RT thread.
From the docs, my understanding is that this can be accomplished in g++ with:
// global
Data *rt_data;
Data *swap_data(Data *new_data)
{
#ifdef __GNUC__
// Atomic pointer swap.
Data *old_d = __sync_lock_test_and_set(&rt_data, new_data);
#else
// Non-atomic, cross your fingers.
Data *old_d = rt_data;
rt_data = new_data;
#endif
return old_d;
}
This is the only place in the program (other than initial setup) where rt_data is modified. When rt_data is used in the real-time context, it is copied to a local pointer. For old_d, later on when it is sure that the old memory is not used, it will be freed in the non-RT thread. Is this correct? Do I need volatile anywhere? Are there other synchronization primitives I should be calling?
By the way I am doing this in C++, although I'm interested in whether the answer differs for C.
Thanks ahead of time.
