Re: [PATCH] [5/20] x86: Introduce nsec_barrier()

[Ingo Molnar]

* Andi Kleen <ak@xxxxxxx> wrote:

> nsec_barrier() is a new barrier primitive that stops RDTSC speculation 
> to avoid races with timer interrupts on other CPUs.
> 
> Add it to all architectures. Except for x86 it is a nop right now. I 
> only tested x86, but it's a very simple change.
> 
> On x86 it expands either to LFENCE (for Intel CPUs) or MFENCE (for AMD 
> CPUs) which stops RDTSC on all currently known microarchitectures that 
> implement SSE. On CPUs without SSE there is generally no RDTSC 
> speculation.

i've picked up your rdtsc patches into x86.git but have simplified it: 
there's no nsec_barrier() anymore - rdtsc() is always synchronous. 
MFENCE/LFENCE is fast enough. Open-coding such barriers almost always 
leads to needless trouble. Please check the next x86.git tree.

	Ingo
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