Re: [PATCH 0/2] jump label: 2.6.38 updates

[Will Newton]

On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 12:18 PM, Steven Rostedt <rostedt@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Wed, 2011-02-16 at 10:15 +0000, Will Newton wrote:
>
>> > That's some really crippled hardware... it does seem like *any* loads
>> > from *any* address updated by an sc would have to be done with ll as
>> > well, else they may load stale values. One could work this into
>> > atomic_read(), but surely there are other places that are problems.
>>
>> I think it's actually ok, atomics have arch implemented accessors, as
>> do spinlocks and atomic bitops. Those are the only place we do sc so
>> we can make sure we always ll or invalidate manually.
>
> I'm curious, how is cmpxchg() implemented on this architecture? As there
> are several places in the kernel that uses this on regular variables
> without any "accessor" functions.

We can invalidate the cache manually. The current cpu will see the new
value (post-cache invalidate) and the other cpus will see either the
old value or the new value depending on whether they read before or
after the invalidate, which is racy but I don't think it is
problematic. Unless I'm missing something...
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