On Fri, Jun 03, 2016 at 05:08:27AM -0700, Paul E. McKenney wrote: > On Fri, Jun 03, 2016 at 11:38:34AM +0200, Peter Zijlstra wrote: > > On Fri, Jun 03, 2016 at 02:48:38PM +0530, Vineet Gupta wrote: > > > On Wednesday 25 May 2016 09:27 PM, Paul E. McKenney wrote: > > > > For your example, but keeping the compiler in check: > > > > > > > > if (READ_ONCE(a)) > > > > WRITE_ONCE(b, 1); > > > > smp_rmb(); > > > > WRITE_ONCE(c, 2); > > > > So I think it example is broken. The store to @c is not in fact > > dependent on the condition of @a. > > At first glance, the compiler could pull the write to "c" above the > conditional, but the "memory" constraint in smp_rmb() prevents this. > From a hardware viewpoint, the write to "c" does depend on the "if", > as the conditional branch does precede that write in execution order. > > But yes, this is using smp_rmb() in a very strange way, if that is > what you are getting at. Well, the CPU could decide that the store to C happens either way around the branch. I'm not sure I'd rely on CPUs not being _that_ clever. test %a, $0 jnz 1f mov $1, %b 1: mov $2, %c Its not too much to ask the CPU to look ahead 2 instructions to figure out the store into c is going to happen unconditionally. I would really only rely on stores immediately dependent on the conditional. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe netfilter-devel" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html