On Thu, Jan 18, 2018 at 09:45:03PM +0100, David Hildenbrand wrote: > Actually, the problem is there are no atomic byte-based operations on > s390x without Interlocked-Access-Facility 2. > > Even __sync_fetch_and_or(&gisa->ipm, value) falls back to a > Compare-And-Swap loop. And Compare-And-Swap also operates at least on 32bit. > > So I assume there isn't too much we can do about it. As storage > locations following the u8 are also written - but in an atomic matter, > it should in general not matter. > > But can we avoid starting the bitmap at the beginning of the gisa? > > What about something like this: > > +void kvm_s390_gisa_set_ipm_gisc(struct kvm_s390_gisa *gisa, u8 gisc) > +{ > + set_bit_inv(gisc, (unsigned long *) &gisa->ipm); > +} set_bit_inv() may use a csg instruction which requires an 8 byte alignment of the operand. What you propose would crash immediately. The code written by Michael is fine as-is.