On 2018-7-10 Tue at 20:17:27，Peter Zijlstra Wrote： Hi Peter Since Huacai unable to send email via client, I'm going to reply for him > Sure.. we all got that far. And no, this isn't the _real_ problem. This > is a manifestation of the problem. > > The problem is that your SFB is broken (per the Linux requirements). We > require that stores will become visible. That is, they must not > indefinitely (for whatever reason) stay in the store buffer. > > > I don't think this is a hardware bug, in design, SFB will flushed to > > L1 cache in three cases: > > > > 1, data in SFB is full (be a complete cache line); > > 2, there is a subsequent read access in the same cache line; > > 3, a 'sync' instruction is executed. > > And I think this _is_ a hardware bug. You just designed the bug instead > of it being by accident. Yes, we understood that this hardware feature is not supported by LKML, so it should be a hardware bug for LKML. > > It doesn't happen an _any_ other architecture except that dodgy > ARM11MPCore part. Linux hard relies on stores to become available > _eventually_. > > Still, even with the rules above, the best work-around is still the very > same cpu_relax() hack. As you say, SFB makes Loongson not fully SMP-coherent. However, modify cpu_relax can solve the current problem, but not so straight forward. On the other hand, providing a Loongson-specific WRITE_ONCE looks more reasonable, because it the eliminate the "non-cohrency". So we can solve the bug from the root. Thanks. -- Jiaxun Yang
