On Tue, Nov 12, 2019 at 12:29 PM Alan Stern <stern@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > I'm trying to solve a real problem: How to tell KCSAN and the compiler > that we don't care about certain access patterns which result in > hardware-level races, and how to guarantee that the object code will > still work correctly when those races occur. Not telling the compiler > anything is a head-in-the-sand approach that will be dangerous in the > long run. I don't actually know how KCSAN ends up reading the annotations, but since it's apparently not using the 'volatile' as a marker. [ Goes off and fetches the thing ] Ugh, that's just nasty. Honestly, my preferred model would have been to just add a comment, and have the reporting tool know to then just ignore it. So something like + // Benign data-race on min_flt tsk->min_flt++; perf_sw_event(PERF_COUNT_SW_PAGE_FAULTS_MIN, 1, regs, address); for the case that Eric mentioned - the tool would trigger on "data-race", and the rest of the comment could/should be for humans. Without making the code uglier, but giving the potential for a nice leghibl.e explanation instead of a completely illegible "let's randomly use WRITE_ONCE() here" or something like that. Could the KCSAN code be taught to do something like that by simply not instrumenting it? Or, as mentioned, just have the reporting logic maybe have a list of those comments (easily generated with some variation of "git grep -in data-race" or something) and logic to just ignore any report that comes from a line below that kind of comment? Because I do not see a pretty way to annotate random things like this that actually makes the code more legible. The READ_ONCE/WRITE_ONCE annotations have not imho improved the code quality. Linus