On 01/14/2016 02:55 PM, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
OK, so it looks like Will was asking not about WRC+addr+addr, but instead about WRC+sync+addr.
(He actually asked twice about this and that too but skip this)
I am guessing that the manual's "Older instructions which must be globally performed when the SYNC instruction completes" provides the equivalent of ARM/Power A-cumulativity, which can be thought of as transitivity backwards in time. This leads me to believe that your smp_mb() needs to use SYNC rather than SYNC_MB, as was the subject of earlier spirited discussion in this thread.
Don't be fooled here by words "ordered" and "completed" - it is HW design items and actually written poorly. Just assume that SYNC_MB is absolutely the same as SYNC for any CPU and coherent device (besides performance). The difference can be in non-coherent devices because SYNC actually tries to make a barrier for them too. In some SoCs it is just the same because there is no need to barrier a non-coherent device (device register access usually strictly ordered... if there is no bridge in between).
Suppose you have something like this: ... Does your hardware guarantee that it is not possible for all of r0, r1, r2, and r3 to be equal to zero at the end of the test, assuming that a, b, c, and d are all initially zero, and the four functions above run concurrently?
It is assumed to be so from Arch point of view. HW bugs are possible, of course.
Another (more academic) case is this one, with x and y initially zero: ... Does SYNC_MB() prohibit r1 == 1 && r2 == 0 && r3 == 1 && r4 == 0?
It is assumed to be so from Arch point of view. HW bugs are possible, of course.
Note: I am not sure about ANY past MIPS R2 CPU because that stuff is implemented some time but nobody made it in Linux kernel (it was used by some vendor for non-Linux system). For that reason my patch for lightweight SYNCs has an option - implement it or implement a generic SYNC. It is possible that some vendor did it in different way but nobody knows or test it. But as a minimum - SYNC must be implemented in spinlocks/atomics/bitops, in recent P5600 it is proven that read can pass write in atomics.
MIPS R6 is a different story, I verified lightweight SYNCs from the beginning and it also should use SYNCs.
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