On Mon, 24 Aug 2015, Alan Stern wrote: > On Mon, 24 Aug 2015, David Miller wrote: > > > From: Eugene Shatokhin <eugene.shatok...@rosalab.ru> > > Date: Wed, 19 Aug 2015 14:59:01 +0300 > > > > > So the following might be possible, although unlikely: > > > > > > CPU0 CPU1 > > > clear_bit: read dev->flags > > > clear_bit: clear EVENT_RX_KILL in the read value > > > > > > dev->flags=0; > > > > > > clear_bit: write updated dev->flags > > > > > > As a result, dev->flags may become non-zero again. > > > > Is this really possible? > > > > Stores really are "atomic" in the sense that the do their update > > in one indivisible operation. > > Provided you use ACCESS_ONCE or WRITE_ONCE or whatever people like to > call it now. > > > Atomic operations like clear_bit also will behave that way. > > Are you certain about that? I couldn't find any mention of it in > Documentation/atomic_ops.txt. > > In theory, an architecture could implement atomic bit operations using > a spinlock to insure atomicity. I don't know if any architectures do > this, but if they do then the scenario above could arise.
Now that I see this in writing, I realize it's not possible after all. clear_bit() et al. will work with a single unsigned long, which doesn't leave any place for spinlocks or other mechanisms. I was thinking of atomic_t. So never mind... Alan Stern -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
