Re: [RFC v2 4/7] powerpc: atomic: Implement xchg_* and atomic{,64}_xchg_* variants

[Boqun Feng]

Hi Paul,

On Thu, Oct 01, 2015 at 11:03:01AM -0700, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 01, 2015 at 07:13:04PM +0200, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> > On Thu, Oct 01, 2015 at 08:09:09AM -0700, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> > > On Thu, Oct 01, 2015 at 02:24:40PM +0200, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> > 
> > > > I must say I'm somewhat surprised by this level of relaxation, I had
> > > > expected to only loose SMP barriers, not the program order ones.
> > > > 
> > > > Is there a good argument for this?
> > > 
> > > Yes, when we say "relaxed", we really mean relaxed.  ;-)
> > > 
> > > Both the CPU and the compiler are allowed to reorder around relaxed
> > > operations.
> > 
> > Is this documented somewhere, because I completely missed this part.
> 
> Well, yes, these need to be added to the documentation.  I am assuming

Maybe it's good time for us to call it out which operation should be
a compiler barrier or a CPU barrier?

I had something in my mind while I was working on this series, not
really sure whether it's correct, but probably a start point:

All global and local atomic operations are at least atomic(no one can
observe the middle state) and volatile(compilers can't optimize out the
memory access). Based on this, there are four strictness levels, one
can rely on them:

RELAXED: neither a compiler barrier or a CPU barrier
LOCAL: a compiler barrier
PARTIAL: both a compiler barrier and a CPU barrier but not transitive
FULL: both compiler barrier and a CPU barrier, and transitive.

RELAXED includes all _relaxed variants and non-return atomics, LOCAL
includes all local atomics(local_* and {cmp}xchg_local), PARTIAL
includes _acquire and _release operations and FULL includes all fully
ordered global atomic operations.

Thoughts?

Regards,
Boqun

> that Will is looking to have the same effect as C11 memory_order_relaxed,
> which is relaxed in this sense.  If he has something else in mind,
> he needs to tell us what it is and why.  ;-)
> 
> 							Thanx, Paul
>

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