Re: [PATCH 02/26] rewrite READ_ONCE/WRITE_ONCE

[Peter Zijlstra]

On Fri, Mar 03, 2017 at 09:26:50AM +0100, Christian Borntraeger wrote:
> Right. The main purpose is to read/write _ONCE_. You can assume a somewhat
> atomic access for sizes <= word size. And there are certainly places that
> rely on that. But the *ONCE thing is mostly used for things where we used
> barrier() 10 years ago.

A lot of code relies on READ/WRITE_ONCE() to generate single
instructions for naturally aligned machined word sized loads/stores
(something GCC used to guarantee, but does no longer IIRC).

So much so that I would say its a bug if READ/WRITE_ONCE() doesn't
generate a single instruction under those conditions.

However, every time I've tried to introduce stricter
semantics/primitives to verify things Linus hated it.