Re: convert SpinLock* macros to static inline functions

Nathan Bossart <nathandbossart@gmail.com>

From: Nathan Bossart <nathandbossart@gmail.com>
To: Fabrízio de Royes Mello <fabriziomello@gmail.com>
Cc: Heikki Linnakangas <hlinnaka@iki.fi>, Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>, "pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org" <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>
Date: 2026-02-18T18:03:19Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers
On Wed, Feb 18, 2026 at 02:52:46PM -0300, Fabrízio de Royes Mello wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 18, 2026 at 2:28 PM Nathan Bossart <nathandbossart@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>> However, as soon as I did this, I got a bunch of build failures because
>> various parts of the code still use volatile qualifiers quite liberally.
>> It looks like most of these (e.g., see code from commits 2487d872e0,
>> 966fb05b58, 4bc15a8bfb, and 4db3744f1f) predate making spinlocks compiler
>> barriers (commit 0709b7ee72) or were cargo-culted from code that predated
>> it.  So, IIUC, it's probably safe to remove these volatile qualifiers now.
>> We could alternatively add volatile qualifiers to the new static inline
>> function parameters, but that seems like it might just encourage continued
>> unnecessary use.
> 
> Just wondering if there's some code-path that uses it inside
> PG_TRY..PG_CATCH that can use longjump.

I didn't notice any such code.  For reference, we only need "volatile" in
PG_TRY..PG_CATCH code if a local variable is modified in the PG_TRY section
and used in the PG_CATCH section.

-- 
nathan



Commits

  1. Convert SpinLock* macros to static inline functions.

  2. Remove SpinLockFree() and S_LOCK_FREE().

  3. Change the spinlock primitives to function as compiler barriers.