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*** Ideas about POSIX Compare & Swap ***

NOTE: These ideas and code snippets have not been tested at all; not even
  compiled. All such ugly (because almost surely slow) code (including the
  two global mutexes) should NOT be compiled on an arch that has a better
  implementation of these functions. => use #ifdef ...


IDEA: We could write the POSIX-only CAS. It's ugly, from a performance point
  of view. To be avoided at almost any cost. Useful for blind porting, quite
  temporarily.

  CAS implementation should look like:
  1. get POSIX lock (maybe by spin-locking)
  2. do comparison and potential swap operation (non-atomically, in plain C)
  3. release POSIX lock
  4. end of CAS.

  pthread_mutex_t _svmv_dummy_compare_and_swap_mutex;
  static inline jboolean
  _svmh_compare_and_swap (volatile _svmt_word *pword, _svmt_word old_value,
     _svmt_word new_value)
  {
    jboolean result;
    _svmm_mutex_lock (_svmv_dummy_compare_and_swap_mutex);
     if (*pword == old_value)
       {
         *pword = new_value;
         result = 1;
       }
     else
       {
         result = 0;
       }
    _svmm_mutex_unlock ();
    
    return result;
  }

  Note:  You must initialize _svmv_dummy_compare_and_swap_mutex in lib_init.c
  with the instruction:
  _svmm_mutex_init (_svmv_dummy_compare_and_swap_mutex);

  In fact, you should put this code in some _svmf_system_init() function
  (within system.c), then call this function within
  _svmf_internal_init() of lib_init.c
  so as to follow the current convention for *one time* initializations.