On Tue, Jan 11, 2022 at 11:11:32AM -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> Of course, in practice, for pointers, the whole "dereference off a
> pointer" on the read side *does* imply a barrier in all relevant
> situations. So yes, a smp_store_release() -> READ_ONCE() does work in
> practice, although it's technically wrong (in particular, it's wrong
> on alpha, because of the completely broken memory ordering that alpha
> has that doesn't even honor data dependencies as read-side orderings)
On a tangent, that actually works, even on Alpha, see commit
d646285885154 ("alpha: Override READ_ONCE() with barriered
implementation").
