Re: [PATCH 4/9] firewire: don't use PREPARE_DELAYED_WORK

From: James Bottomley
Date: Sun Feb 23 2014 - 15:06:14 EST


On Sat, 2014-02-22 at 14:03 -0500, Peter Hurley wrote:
> If it is necessary for a RELEASE-ACQUIRE pair to produce a full barrier, the
> ACQUIRE can be followed by an smp_mb__after_unlock_lock() invocation. This
> will produce a full barrier if either (a) the RELEASE and the ACQUIRE are
> executed by the same CPU or task, or (b) the RELEASE and ACQUIRE act on the
> same variable. The smp_mb__after_unlock_lock() primitive is free on many
> architectures. Without smp_mb__after_unlock_lock(), the critical sections
> corresponding to the RELEASE and the ACQUIRE can cross:
>
> *A = a;
> RELEASE M
> ACQUIRE N
> *B = b;
>
> could occur as:
>
> ACQUIRE N, STORE *B, STORE *A, RELEASE M

Ah, OK, that's an error in the documentation. The example should read

*A = a;
RELEASE *N*
ACQUIRE *M*
*B = b;

The point being you can't have speculation that entangles critical
sections, as I've been saying, because that would speculate you into
ABBA deadlocks. Paul McKenny will submit a patch fixing the bug in
documentation.

James


--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/