On Thu, Jan 14, 2016 at 03:33:40PM -0800, Leonid Yegoshin wrote: > 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) Fair enough! ;-) > >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). So smp_mb() can be SYNC_MB. However, mb() needs to be SYNC for MMIO purposes, correct? > >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. Indeed! > >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. Looks to me like smp_mb() can be SYNC_MB, then. > 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. So you need to build a different kernel for some types of MIPS systems? Or do you do boot-time rewriting, like a number of other arches do? Thanx, Paul
