That was a nasty one, Debug build would never have any issue (even tried
with 64 threads!), but Release build would deadlock nearly immediately,
even with only 2 threads!
What happened here (I think) is that gcc optimizer would generate a
specific path endlessly looping when initial value of virtual_lock was
FLT_MAX, by-passing re-assignment from v_no[0] and the atomic cas
completely. Which would have been correct, should v_no[0] not have been
shared (and modified) by multiple threads. ;)
Idea of that (broken) for loop was to avoid completely calling the
atomic cas as long as v_no[0] was locked by some other thread, but...
Guess the avoided/missing memory barrier was the root of the issue here.
Lesson of the evening: Remember kids, do not trust your compiler to
understand all possible threading-related side effects, and be explicit
rather than elegant when using atomic ops!
Side-effect lesson: do check both release and debug builds when messing
with said atomic ops...
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