Hi Peter,

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Peter Zijlstra <[email protected]>
> Sent: Thursday, February 14, 2019 1:32 PM
> To: Vineet Gupta <[email protected]>
> Cc: David Laight <[email protected]>; Alexey Brodkin 
> <[email protected]>; linux-snps-
> [email protected]; Arnd Bergmann <[email protected]>; 
> [email protected];
> [email protected]; Mark Rutland <[email protected]>
> Subject: Re: [PATCH] ARC: Explicitly set ARCH_SLAB_MINALIGN = 8
> 
> On Wed, Feb 13, 2019 at 03:23:36PM -0800, Vineet Gupta wrote:
> > On 2/13/19 4:56 AM, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> > >
> > > Personally I think u64 and company should already force natural
> > > alignment; but alas.
> >
> > But there is an ISA/ABI angle here too. e.g. On 32-bit ARC, LDD (load 
> > double) is
> > allowed to take a 32-bit aligned address to load a register pair. Thus all 
> > u64
> > need not be 64-bit aligned (unless attribute aligned 8 etc) hence the 
> > relaxation
> > in ABI (alignment of long long is 4). You could certainly argue that we end 
> > up
> > undoing some of it anyways by defining things like ARCH_KMALLOC_MINALIGN to 
> > 8, but
> > still...
> 
> So what happens if the data is then split across two cachelines; will a
> STD vs LDD still be single-copy-atomic? I don't _think_ we rely on that
> for > sizeof(unsigned long), with the obvious exception of atomic64_t,
> but yuck...

STD & LDD are simple store/load instructions so there's no problem for
their 64-bit data to be from 2 subsequent cache lines as well as 2 pages
(if we're that unlucky). Or you mean something else?

> So even though it is allowed by the chip; does it really make sense to
> use this?

It gives performance benefits when dealing with either 64-bit or even
larger buffers, see how we use it in our string routines like here [1].

[1] 
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/arch/arc/lib/memset-archs.S#n81

-Alexey

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