On Wed, Jan 02, 2019 at 04:36:40PM -0500, Alan Stern
wrote:> On Wed, 2 Jan 2019, Michael S. Tsirkin wrote:
>
> > So as explained in Documentation/memory-barriers.txt e.g.
> > a load followed by a store require a full memory barrier,
> > to avoid store being ordered before the load.
> > Similarly load-load requires a read memory barrier.
> >
> > Thinking about it, we can actually create a data dependency
> > by mixing the first loaded value into the pointer being
> > accessed.
> >
> > This adds an API for this and uses it in virtio.
> >
> > Written over the holiday and build tested only so far.
>
> You are using the terminology from memory-barriers.txt, referring to
> the new dependency you create as a data dependency. However,
> tools/memory-model/* uses a more precise name, calling it an address
> dependency. Could you change the comments in the patches to use this
> name instead?
Sure, sounds good. While I'm at it, should memory-barriers.txt be
switched over too?
> > This patchset is also suboptimal on e.g. x86 where e.g. smp_rmb is a
nop.
>
> This should be easy to fix with an architecture-specific override.
>
> Alan Stern
Absolutely. It does however mean that we'll need several
variants: mb/rmb, smp/dma/virt/mandatory.
I am still trying to decide whether it's good since it documents the
kind of barrier that we are trying to use - or bad since it's more
verbose and makes you choose one where they are all pretty cheap.
> > Sending out for early feedback/flames.
> >
> > Michael S. Tsirkin (4):
> > include/linux/compiler*.h: fix OPTIMIZER_HIDE_VAR
> > include/linux/compiler.h: allow memory operands
> > barriers: convert a control to a data dependency
> > virtio: use dependent_ptr_mb
> >
> > Documentation/memory-barriers.txt | 20 ++++++++++++++++++++
> > arch/alpha/include/asm/barrier.h | 1 +
> > drivers/virtio/virtio_ring.c | 6 ++++--
> > include/asm-generic/barrier.h | 18 ++++++++++++++++++
> > include/linux/compiler-clang.h | 5 ++---
> > include/linux/compiler-gcc.h | 4 ----
> > include/linux/compiler-intel.h | 4 +---
> > include/linux/compiler.h | 8 +++++++-
> > 8 files changed, 53 insertions(+), 13 deletions(-)