Responsiveness when looping on speculative atomic memory updates

Abstract

A present invention embodiment improves responsiveness when looping on speculative atomic memory updates. A conditionally atomic updating instruction is determined to have encountered a fail condition. A fail loop of the conditionally atomic updating instruction is determined to have occurred. In response to determining that the conditionally atomic updating instruction has encountered the fail condition and that the fail loop has occurred, a count that each cross-interrogation request (XI) instruction rejection contributes toward an XI rejection count that is compared to a threshold is increased. In response to the XI rejection count satisfying the threshold, performing a selfish store mitigation operation, wherein the selfish store mitigation operation blocks a thread or core responsible for the fail loop from inserting a new instruction into an instruction pipeline and flushes non-completed instructions of the thread or core from the instruction pipeline.