Hi, I've been looking into cleaning up bitrot in ARC SMP support. Unlike some other arches/platforms, we don't have per-msg-type IRQ, so the actual msg (say cross function call) corresponding to IPI needs to be encoded in a per-cpu word (1 bit per msg type) before kicking the IPI. The current code (indicative below) is completely bonkers as it calls set_bit w/o any protection whatsoever, clearly racy in case of multiple senders, where receiver could end up NOT seeing one of the writes. ipi_send_msg(cpu, msg-type) { struct ipi_data *ipi_data = &per_cpu(ipi_data, cpu); local_irq_save(); set_bit(msg-type, &ipi_data->bits) plat_smp_ops.ipi_send(cpumask) local_irq_restore(); } Adding a spinlock here would serialize the sending part, but I still see issue in receiver. Upon receipt of First IPI, the msg holding word will be atomically exchanged with 0, so 2nd IPI will not see any msg in the word. Augmenting with an atomic counter would only help detect the issue - but I don't see how it will help elide the issue. Does that mean w/o proper hardware assist (i.e. IRQ providing the msg id indication), the race, however small, remains ? Comments much appreciated ! -Vineet -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-arch" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html