In February 2026, Wang Miao ran into something strange while packaging normaliz for Debian on a LoongArch server: the math software's built-in test kept timing out, stuck in an infinite loop that it could not escape. Following the code, the problem pointed to a very ordinary operation: OpenMP's #pragma omp atomic accumulating into a shared variable. The loop's exit condition required the accumulated value to equal a certain number, but the accumulated result was always less than that number, causing the infinite loop. Because the program was large and the code complex, we never managed to reduce it to a minimal example a human could understand, so the matter was shelved.
Half a year later, in August, Wang Miao came to me again, wanting to pick it back up. This time we took a different approach: instead of having a human locate the problem, we let AI find a minimal reproduction, with the human directing the AI's investigation. About two days later, we had a stable reproducer, and only then discovered the root cause: the CPU's atomic add instruction occasionally fails to be atomic. This meant we had found a new CPU erratum, and after Loongson learned of it, only two weeks passed before they found a fix with almost no performance loss and provided us with test firmware. We confirmed that the test firmware resolves the issue, and Loongson told us the firmware is expected to be released before National Day (October 1), at which point readers will be able to upgrade their firmware to fix the problem.
半年后的 8 月,王邈再次找到我,想把它重新捡起来。这回我们换了个做法:不再由人来定位问题,而是让 AI 去找最小复现,人在这个过程中负责指挥 AI 调查的方向。大概两天后,我们拿到一个稳定的复现程序,才发现事情的根源是:CPU 的原子加法指令,居然偶尔会不原子。这意味着我们找到了 CPU 的一个新 erratum,而龙芯得知这件事后,仅仅过了两周,就找到了几乎没有性能损失的修复方法,并给我们提供了测试固件。我们确认了测试固件可以解决问题,并且龙芯告诉我们,该测试固件预计在国庆(10 月 1 日)之前发布,届时读者将可以升级固件以修复该问题。
I've been running some benchmarks with SPEC CPU 2026 recently, and plan to do in-depth workload analysis combined with the test results. This article focuses on SPEC INT 2026 Rate workload characteristics. For SPEC FP 2026 Rate analysis, see the FP Rate article.