Re: [RESEND PATCH v5] locking/pvqspinlock: Relax cmpxchg's to improve performance on some archs

[Will Deacon]

On Mon, Aug 21, 2017 at 09:25:50PM +0200, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 21, 2017 at 07:00:02PM +0100, Will Deacon wrote:
> > > No, I meant _from_ the LL load, not _to_ a later load.
> > 
> > Sorry, I'm still not following enough to give you a definitive answer on
> > that. Could you give an example, please? These sequences usually run in
> > a loop, so the conditional branch back (based on the status flag) is where
> > the read-after-read comes in.
> > 
> > Any control dependencies from the loaded data exist regardless of the status
> > flag.
> 
> Basically what Waiman ended up doing, something like:
> 
>         if (cmpxchg_relaxed(&pn->state, vcpu_halted, vcpu_hashed) != vcpu_halted)
>                 return;
> 
>         WRITE_ONCE(l->locked, _Q_SLOW_VAL);
> 
> Where the STORE depends on the LL value being 'complete'.

Yup, that's ordered as you would expect. Thanks for the example!

Will