Re: Fix locking in input
From: Timothy Miller
Date: Wed Dec 03 2003 - 18:43:34 EST
Manfred Spraul wrote:
Russell King wrote:
On Sun, Nov 23, 2003 at 11:24:02PM +0100, Manfred Spraul wrote:
I think one platform (early ARM?) cannot access bytes directly, and
implement the access with read 16-bit, change 8-bit, write back 16
bit.
Nope.
It seems it's Alpha:
On Thu, 28 Dec 2000, Linus wrote:
FreeBSD doesn't try to be portable any more, but Linux does, and there
are
architectures where 8- and 16-bit accesses aren't *atomic* but have to be
done with read-modify-write cycles.
And even for fields like "age", where we don't care whether the age
itself
is 100% accurate, we _do_ care that the fields close-by don't get strange
effects from updating "age". We used to have exactly this problem on
alpha
back in the 2.1.x timeframe.
This is MOSTLY true, but not entirely. As I recall, Alpha has two
addressing modes: Sparse and Dense.
The mode you're referring to is dense addressing where 32-bit and 64-bit
accesses are atomic, but 16 and 8 bit accesses require RMW.
Sparse mode allows for atomic 8 and 16 bit accesses, but the access size
is specified in the address using a rather bizarre binary encoding that
doesn't look much like a regular address value. You would probably not
want to use this unless you absolutely HAD to use some I/O device that
required atomic byte or word accesses.
I'm sure someone else will (or already has) pipe(d) in with a more
accurate explanation. :)
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