On Fri, Nov 01, 2013 at 03:56:34PM +0100, Peter Zijlstra wrote: > On Wed, Oct 30, 2013 at 11:40:15PM -0700, Paul E. McKenney wrote: > > > Now the whole crux of the question is if we need barrier A at all, since > > > the STORES issued by the @buf writes are dependent on the ubuf->tail > > > read. > > > > The dependency you are talking about is via the "if" statement? > > Even C/C++11 is not required to respect control dependencies. > > > > This one is a bit annoying. The x86 TSO means that you really only > > need barrier(), ARM (recent ARM, anyway) and Power could use a weaker > > barrier, and so on -- but smp_mb() emits a full barrier. > > > > Perhaps a new smp_tmb() for TSO semantics, where reads are ordered > > before reads, writes before writes, and reads before writes, but not > > writes before reads? Another approach would be to define a per-arch > > barrier for this particular case. > > I suppose we can only introduce new barrier primitives if there's more > than 1 use-case.
There probably are others. > > > If the read shows no available space, we simply will not issue those > > > writes -- therefore we could argue we can avoid the memory barrier. > > > > Proving that means iterating through the permitted combinations of > > compilers and architectures... There is always hand-coded assembly > > language, I suppose. > > I'm starting to think that while the C/C++ language spec says they can > wreck the world by doing these silly optimization, real world users will > push back for breaking their existing code. > > I'm fairly sure the GCC people _will_ get shouted at _loudly_ when they > break the kernel by doing crazy shit like that. > > Given its near impossible to write a correct program in C/C++ and > tagging the entire kernel with __atomic is equally not going to happen, > I think we must find a practical solution. > > Either that, or we really need to consider forking the language and > compiler :-( Depends on how much benefit the optimizations provide. If they provide little or no benefit, I am with you, otherwise we will need to bit some bullet or another. Keep in mind that there is a lot of code in the kernel that runs sequentially (e.g., due to being fully protected by locks), and aggressive optimizations for that sort of code are harmless. Can't say I know the answer at the moment, though. Thanx, Paul _______________________________________________ Linuxppc-dev mailing list Linuxppc-dev@lists.ozlabs.org https://lists.ozlabs.org/listinfo/linuxppc-dev