Use of barriers in pvclock ABI

From: Jeremy Fitzhardinge
Date: Fri Aug 08 2008 - 15:52:22 EST


In Xen, we guarantee that the pv clock record will only ever be updated by the current cpu, so there will never be any cross-cpu barrier or synchronization issues to consider, nor any chance a vcpu will see its own clock record in a partially updated state.

I notice the current kvm implementation is the same.

However, the pvclock_clocksource_read() implementation is over-engineered, because it checks for an odd version and uses very strong rmb() barriers (which generates either an "lfence" or "lock add $0, (%esp)").

If we're happy to guarantee as an ABI issue that the record will never be updated cross-cpu, then we can make the barriers simply barrier() and just check for (src->version != dst->version).

Is that OK with you, or do you want to leave open the possibility of doing cross-cpu time updates?

J
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