Re: Unnecessary barrier in sync_page()?

[Andrea Arcangeli]

On Wed, Jul 07, 2004 at 08:42:02PM +0200, Andrea Arcangeli wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 07, 2004 at 11:29:53AM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > Andrea Arcangeli <andrea@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> > >
> > > however the smp_mb() isn't needed in sync_page, simply because it's
> > >  perfectly ok if we start running sync_page before reading pagelocked.
> > >  All we care about is to run sync_page _before_ io_schedule() and that we
> > >  read PageLocked _after_ prepare_to_wait_exclusive.
> > > 
> > >  So the locking in between PageLocked and sync_page is _absolutely_
> > >  worthless and the smp_mb() can go away.
> > 
> > IIRC, Chris added that barrier (and several similar) for the reads in
> > page_mapping().
> 
> how does it help to know the page is not locked before executing
> page_mapped?

(I expressed it a bit bad, I mean not locked by us)

I mean the lock on the page can go from under us anytime. the the very
best you can try to hide a race condition with such smp_mb, but sure not
fix it.
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/