On Thu, Mar 29, 2018 at 08:31:32AM +1100, Benjamin Herrenschmidt wrote: > On Thu, 2018-03-29 at 02:23 +1000, Nicholas Piggin wrote: > > This is a variation on the mandatory write barrier that causes writes to weakly > > ordered I/O regions to be partially ordered. Its effects may go beyond the > > CPU->Hardware interface and actually affect the hardware at some level. > > > > How can a driver writer possibly get that right? > > > > IIRC it was added for some big ia64 system that was really expensive > > to implement the proper wmb() semantics on. So wmb() semantics were > > quietly downgraded, then the subsequently broken drivers they cared > > about were fixed by adding the stronger mmiowb(). > > > > What should have happened was wmb and writel remained correct, sane, and > > expensive, and they add an mmio_wmb() to order MMIO stores made by the > > writel_relaxed accessors, then use that to speed up the few drivers they > > care about. > > > > Now that ia64 doesn't matter too much, can we deprecate mmiowb and just > > make wmb ordering talk about stores to the device, not to some > > intermediate stage of the interconnect where it can be subsequently > > reordered wrt the device? Drivers can be converted back to using wmb > > or writel gradually. > > I was under the impression that mmiowb was specifically about ordering > writel's with a subsequent spin_unlock, without it, MMIOs from > different CPUs (within the same lock) would still arrive OO. > > If that's indeed the case, I would suggest ia64 switches to a similar > per-cpu flag trick powerpc uses. ... or we could remove ia64. /me runs for cover Will -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-rdma" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
