Hello, This patch series adds support for a family of relaxed atomics to the kernel. More specifically: - acquire/release/relaxed flavours of xchg, cmpxchg and {add,sub}_return - atomic_read_acquire - atomic_set_release This came out of a separate patch series porting the (barrier-heavy) qrwlock code to arm64. Rather than have arch-specific hooks littered around the place, it makes more sense to define a core set of relaxed atomics that can be used regardless of architecture. For now, the definitions simply take on the existing (i.e. full-barrier) semantics, but there is a direct mapping onto arm64 and even architectures with explicit memory barrier instructions (e.g. powerpc, arm) can benefit, as they do from the existing smp_load_acquire/smp_store_release macros. The final patch is a proof-of-concept port of the qrwlock over to the new atomics. It's based on some of the pending patches from me and Waiman, so it won't apply to mainline but I think it illustrates the usage well enough. All feedback welcome, Will --->8 Will Deacon (5): atomics: add acquire/release/relaxed variants of some atomic operations asm-generic: rework atomic-long.h to avoid bulk code duplication asm-generic: add relaxed/acquire/release variants for atomic_long_t lockref: remove homebrew cmpxchg64_relaxed macro definition locking/qrwlock: make use of acquire/release/relaxed atomics Documentation/atomic_ops.txt | 4 +- include/asm-generic/atomic-long.h | 263 ++++++++++++++------------------------ include/asm-generic/qrwlock.h | 13 +- include/linux/atomic.h | 140 ++++++++++++++++++++ kernel/locking/qrwlock.c | 12 +- lib/lockref.c | 8 -- 6 files changed, 248 insertions(+), 192 deletions(-) -- 2.1.4 -- 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