[PATCH v2] Documentation: rewrite confusing statement about memory barriers

From: Guilherme G. Piccoli
Date: Thu Sep 21 2017 - 15:29:16 EST


In this specific portion of the write memory barriers description,
the documentation mentions sequential order of stores, which is
confusing since sequential ordering is not guaranteed.

This patch tries to improve the doc in order to avoid any
mis-understanding.

Cc: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Signed-off-by: Guilherme G. Piccoli <gpiccoli@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
---

v2: added Paul in CC.

Documentation/memory-barriers.txt | 4 ++--
1 file changed, 2 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)

diff --git a/Documentation/memory-barriers.txt b/Documentation/memory-barriers.txt
index b759a60624fd..a4bbbd1b63a0 100644
--- a/Documentation/memory-barriers.txt
+++ b/Documentation/memory-barriers.txt
@@ -383,8 +383,8 @@ Memory barriers come in four basic varieties:
to have any effect on loads.

A CPU can be viewed as committing a sequence of store operations to the
- memory system as time progresses. All stores before a write barrier will
- occur in the sequence _before_ all the stores after the write barrier.
+ memory system as time progresses. All stores _before_ a write barrier
+ will occur _before_ all the stores after the write barrier.

[!] Note that write barriers should normally be paired with read or data
dependency barriers; see the "SMP barrier pairing" subsection.
--
2.14.1