Sometimes it is very reassuring that certain things do not work when tested in practice, especially when you have been telling people that for a long time. In my talks about Debugging Multicore Systems at the Embedded Systems Conference Silicon Valley in 2006 and 2007, I had a fairly long discussion about relaxed or weak memory consistency models and their effect on parallel software when run on a truly concurrent machine. I used Dekker’s Algorithm as an example of code that works just fine on a single-processor machine with a multitasking operating system, but that fails to work on a dual-processor machine. Over Christmas, I finally did a practical test of just how easy it was to make it fail in reality. Which turned out to showcase some interesting properties of various types and brands of hardware and software.
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