On Thu, Nov 07, 2013 at 04:50:23AM -0800, Michel Lespinasse wrote: > On Thu, Nov 7, 2013 at 4:06 AM, Linus Torvalds > <torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > > On Nov 7, 2013 6:55 PM, "Michel Lespinasse" <walken@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > >> > >> Rather than writing arch-specific locking code, would you agree to > >> introduce acquire and release memory operations ? > > > > Yes, that's probably the right thing to do. What ops do we need? Store with > > release, cmpxchg and load with acquire? Anything else? > > Depends on what lock types we want to implement on top; for MCS we would need: > - xchg acquire (common case) and load acquire (for spinning on our > locker's wait word) > - cmpxchg release (when there is no next locker) and store release > (when writing to the next locker's wait word) > > One downside of the proposal is that using a load acquire for spinning > puts the memory barrier within the spin loop. So this model is very > intuitive and does not add unnecessary barriers on x86, but it my > place the barriers in a suboptimal place for architectures that need > them. OK, I will bite... Why is a barrier in the spinloop suboptimal? Can't say that I have tried measuring it, but the barrier should not normally result in interconnect traffic. Given that the barrier is required anyway, it should not affect lock-acquisition latency. So what am I missing here? Thanx, Paul -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@xxxxxxxxx. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Don't email: <a href=mailto:"dont@xxxxxxxxx";> email@xxxxxxxxx </a>