bugAVR C Runtime Library - Bugs: bug #50987, Not all registers need to be...

 
 

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bug #50987: Not all registers need to be declared volatile

Submitter:  Eric Tang <e_l_tang>
Submitted:  Tue 09 May 2017 08:20:25 PM UTC
   
 
Category:  None Severity:  3 - Normal
Priority:  5 - Normal Item Group:  None
Status:  None Assigned to:  None
Percent Complete:  0% Open/Closed:  Open
Release:  2.0.0 Fixed Release:  None

Sat 23 Dec 2017 10:33:22 AM UTC, comment #3: 

As Ambroz explained, removing volatile is only safe if there are no (side) effects. This case IMHO never happens (each register is there for a specific purpose/effect). The registers with the least hardware side effects probably are the GPIOn registers, which are effectively like global variables. When I use them, it's usually in ISRs, thus, they must be declared volatile.

Voting to close the bug as wontfix.

Anonymous
Tue 09 May 2017 08:51:41 PM UTC, comment #2: 

I think it is generally not a good idea to remove volatile from registers because writing/reading registers generally still has a side effect in addition to just changing the value.

For example, with volatile register accesses are never reordered (a different order may have different semantics).

Another example is that some infinite loops like while(1){REG=1;} would become undefined behavior (at least in C++) without REG being volatile. See: http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/memory_model (Progress guarantee).

In summary I think the only case where removing volatile from a register is where it has no specific hardware semantics at all - reading or writing has no side effect and the value itself does not influence anything.

Ambroz Bizjak <abizjak>
Tue 09 May 2017 08:33:26 PM UTC, comment #1: 

Would you be a /bit/ more specific?

Georg-Johann Lay <gjlayde>
Tue 09 May 2017 08:20:25 PM UTC, original submission:  

Many registers are no different from a global 8-bit variables in that they will always contain the values which were last written to them. The compiler will be able to better optimize code which accesses them if they are not declared volatile.

Eric Tang <e_l_tang>

 

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