On Mon, Nov 24, 2014 at 12:04 PM, David Howells <dhowells@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > Reserve ACCESS_ONCE() for reading and add an ASSIGN_ONCE() or something like > that for writing? I wouldn't mind that. We've had situations where reading and writing isn't really similar - like alpha where reading a byte is atomic, but writing one isn't. Then we could also make it have the "get_user()/put_user()" kind of semantics - .and then use the same "sizeopf()" tricks that we use for get_user/put_user. That would actually work around the gcc bug a completely different way: #define ACCESS_ONCE(p) \ ({ typeof(*p) __val; __read_once_size(p, &__val, sizeof(__val)); __val; }) and then we can do things like this: static __always_inline void __read_once_size(volatile void *p, void *res, int size) { switch (size) { case 1: *(u8 *)res = *(volatile u8 *)p; break; case 2: *(u16 *)res = *(volatile u16 *)p; break; case 4: *(u32 *)res = *(volatile u32 *)p; break; #ifdef CONFIG_64BIT case 8: *(u64 *)res = *(volatile u64 *)p; break; #endif } } and same for ASSIGN_ONCE(val, p). That also hopefully avoids the whole "oops, gcc has a bug", because the actual volatile access is always done using a scalar type, even if the type of "__val" may in fact be a structure. Christian, how painful would that be? Sorry to try to make you do a totally different approach.. Linus