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@@ -74,23 +74,22 @@ Causes of transaction aborts
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Syscalls
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========
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-Syscalls made from within an active transaction will not be performed and the
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-transaction will be doomed by the kernel with the failure code TM_CAUSE_SYSCALL
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-| TM_CAUSE_PERSISTENT.
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+Performing syscalls from within transaction is not recommended, and can lead
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+to unpredictable results.
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-Syscalls made from within a suspended transaction are performed as normal and
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-the transaction is not explicitly doomed by the kernel. However, what the
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-kernel does to perform the syscall may result in the transaction being doomed
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-by the hardware. The syscall is performed in suspended mode so any side
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-effects will be persistent, independent of transaction success or failure. No
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-guarantees are provided by the kernel about which syscalls will affect
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-transaction success.
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+Syscalls do not by design abort transactions, but beware: The kernel code will
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+not be running in transactional state. The effect of syscalls will always
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+remain visible, but depending on the call they may abort your transaction as a
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+side-effect, read soon-to-be-aborted transactional data that should not remain
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+invisible, etc. If you constantly retry a transaction that constantly aborts
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+itself by calling a syscall, you'll have a livelock & make no progress.
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-Care must be taken when relying on syscalls to abort during active transactions
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-if the calls are made via a library. Libraries may cache values (which may
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-give the appearance of success) or perform operations that cause transaction
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-failure before entering the kernel (which may produce different failure codes).
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-Examples are glibc's getpid() and lazy symbol resolution.
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+Simple syscalls (e.g. sigprocmask()) "could" be OK. Even things like write()
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+from, say, printf() should be OK as long as the kernel does not access any
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+memory that was accessed transactionally.
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+
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+Consider any syscalls that happen to work as debug-only -- not recommended for
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+production use. Best to queue them up till after the transaction is over.
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Signals
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@@ -177,7 +176,8 @@ kernel aborted a transaction:
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TM_CAUSE_RESCHED Thread was rescheduled.
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TM_CAUSE_TLBI Software TLB invalid.
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TM_CAUSE_FAC_UNAV FP/VEC/VSX unavailable trap.
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- TM_CAUSE_SYSCALL Syscall from active transaction.
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+ TM_CAUSE_SYSCALL Currently unused; future syscalls that must abort
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+ transactions for consistency will use this.
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TM_CAUSE_SIGNAL Signal delivered.
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TM_CAUSE_MISC Currently unused.
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TM_CAUSE_ALIGNMENT Alignment fault.
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