ARC: Workaround spinlock livelock in SMP SystemC simulation
Some ARC SMP systems lack native atomic R-M-W (LLOCK/SCOND) insns and
can only use atomic EX insn (reg with mem) to build higher level R-M-W
primitives. This includes a SystemC based SMP simulation model.
So rwlocks need to use a protecting spinlock for atomic cmp-n-exchange
operation to update reader(s)/writer count.
The spinlock operation itself looks as follows:
mov reg, 1 ; 1=locked, 0=unlocked
retry:
EX reg, [lock] ; load existing, store 1, atomically
BREQ reg, 1, rety ; if already locked, retry
In single-threaded simulation, SystemC alternates between the 2 cores
with "N" insn each based scheduling. Additionally for insn with global
side effect, such as EX writing to shared mem, a core switch is
enforced too.
Given that, 2 cores doing a repeated EX on same location, Linux often
got into a livelock e.g. when both cores were fiddling with tasklist
lock (gdbserver / hackbench) for read/write respectively as the
sequence diagram below shows: