Using C/Pthreads: do shared variables need to be volatile?

Question

In the C programming language and Pthreads as the threading library; do variables/structures that are shared between threads need to be declared as volatile? Assuming that t

Answer 1

There is a widespread notion that the keyword volatile is good for multi-threaded programming.

Hans Boehm points out that there are only three portable uses for volatile:

• volatile may be used to mark local variables in the same scope as a setjmp whose value should be preserved across a longjmp. It is unclear what fraction of such uses would be slowed down, since the atomicity and ordering constraints have no effect if there is no way to share the local variable in question. (It is even unclear what fraction of such uses would be slowed down by requiring all variables to be preserved across a longjmp, but that is a separate matter and is not considered here.)
• volatile may be used when variables may be "externally modified", but the modification in fact is triggered synchronously by the thread itself, e.g. because the underlying memory is mapped at multiple locations.
• A volatile sigatomic_t may be used to communicate with a signal handler in the same thread, in a restricted manner. One could consider weakening the requirements for the sigatomic_t case, but that seems rather counterintuitive.

If you are multi-threading for the sake of speed, slowing down code is definitely not what you want. For multi-threaded programming, there two key issues that volatile is often mistakenly thought to address:

• atomicity
• memory consistency, i.e. the order of a thread's operations as seen by another thread.

Let's deal with (1) first. Volatile does not guarantee atomic reads or writes. For example, a volatile read or write of a 129-bit structure is not going to be atomic on most modern hardware. A volatile read or write of a 32-bit int is atomic on most modern hardware, but volatile has nothing to do with it. It would likely be atomic without the volatile. The atomicity is at the whim of the compiler. There's nothing in the C or C++ standards that says it has to be atomic.

Now consider issue (2). Sometimes programmers think of volatile as turning off optimization of volatile accesses. That's largely true in practice. But that's only the volatile accesses, not the non-volatile ones. Consider this fragment:

 volatile int Ready;       

    int Message[100];      

    void foo( int i ) {      

        Message[i/10] = 42;      

        Ready = 1;      

    }

It's trying to do something very reasonable in multi-threaded programming: write a message and then send it to another thread. The other thread will wait until Ready becomes non-zero and then read Message. Try compiling this with "gcc -O2 -S" using gcc 4.0, or icc. Both will do the store to Ready first, so it can be overlapped with the computation of i/10. The reordering is not a compiler bug. It's an aggressive optimizer doing its job.

You might think the solution is to mark all your memory references volatile. That's just plain silly. As the earlier quotes say, it will just slow down your code. Worst yet, it might not fix the problem. Even if the compiler does not reorder the references, the hardware might. In this example, x86 hardware will not reorder it. Neither will an Itanium(TM) processor, because Itanium compilers insert memory fences for volatile stores. That's a clever Itanium extension. But chips like Power(TM) will reorder. What you really need for ordering are memory fences, also called memory barriers. A memory fence prevents reordering of memory operations across the fence, or in some cases, prevents reordering in one direction.Volatile has nothing to do with memory fences.

So what's the solution for multi-threaded programming? Use a library or language extension that implements the atomic and fence semantics. When used as intended, the operations in the library will insert the right fences. Some examples:

• POSIX threads
• Windows(TM) threads
• OpenMP
• TBB

Based on article by Arch Robison (Intel)