does presence of mutex help getting rid of volatile key word ?

Question

I have a multi-R/W lock class that keeps the read, write and pending read , pending write counters. A mutex guards them from multiple threads.

My question is Do we

Answer 1

From Herb Sutter's article "Use Critical Sections (Preferably Locks) to Eliminate Races" (http://www.ddj.com/cpp/201804238):

So, for a reordering transformation to be valid, it must respect the program's critical sections by obeying the one key rule of critical sections: Code can't move out of a critical section. (It's always okay for code to move in.) We enforce this golden rule by requiring symmetric one-way fence semantics for the beginning and end of any critical section, illustrated by the arrows in Figure 1:

• Entering a critical section is an acquire operation, or an implicit acquire fence: Code can never cross the fence upward, that is, move from an original location after the fence to execute before the fence. Code that appears before the fence in source code order, however, can happily cross the fence downward to execute later.
• Exiting a critical section is a release operation, or an implicit release fence: This is just the inverse requirement that code can't cross the fence downward, only upward. It guarantees that any other thread that sees the final release write will also see all of the writes before it.

So for a compiler to produce correct code for a target platform, when a critical section is entered and exited (and the term critical section is used in it's generic sense, not necessarily in the Win32 sense of something protected by a CRITICAL_SECTION structure - the critical section can be protected by other synchronization objects) the correct acquire and release semantics must be followed. So you should not have to mark the shared variables as volatile as long as they are accessed only within protected critical sections.