This seems to be a mis-reading of how alpha memory ordering works, and
is not backed up by the alpha architecture manual.  The helper functions
don't do anything special on any other architectures, and the arguments
that support them being safe on other architectures also argue that they
are safe on alpha.

Basically, the "control dependency" is between a previous read and a
subsequent write that is dependent on the value read.  Even if the
subsequent write is actually done speculatively, there is no way that
such a speculative write could be made visible to other cpu's until it
has been committed, which requires validating the speculation.

Note that most weakely ordered architectures (very much including alpha)
do not guarantee any ordering relationship between two loads that depend
on each other on a control dependency:

    read A
    if (val == 1)
        read B

because the conditional may be predicted, and the "read B" may be
spe...