Re: [RFC v2 4/7] powerpc: atomic: Implement xchg_* and atomic{,64}_xchg_* variants

From: Will Deacon
Date: Mon Oct 05 2015 - 10:44:20 EST


On Thu, Oct 01, 2015 at 07:03:01PM +0100, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 01, 2015 at 07:13:04PM +0200, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> > On Thu, Oct 01, 2015 at 08:09:09AM -0700, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> > > On Thu, Oct 01, 2015 at 02:24:40PM +0200, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> >
> > > > I must say I'm somewhat surprised by this level of relaxation, I had
> > > > expected to only loose SMP barriers, not the program order ones.
> > > >
> > > > Is there a good argument for this?
> > >
> > > Yes, when we say "relaxed", we really mean relaxed. ;-)
> > >
> > > Both the CPU and the compiler are allowed to reorder around relaxed
> > > operations.
> >
> > Is this documented somewhere, because I completely missed this part.
>
> Well, yes, these need to be added to the documentation. I am assuming
> that Will is looking to have the same effect as C11 memory_order_relaxed,
> which is relaxed in this sense. If he has something else in mind,
> he needs to tell us what it is and why. ;-)

I was treating them purely as being single-copy atomic and not providing
any memory ordering guarantees (much like the non *_return atomic operations
that we already have). I think this lines up with C11, minus the bits
about data races which we don't call out anyway.

Will
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