Re: [PATCH 17/19] locking/barriers: Kill lockless_dereference

[Will Deacon]

On Tue, Oct 24, 2017 at 11:31:04AM +0200, Ingo Molnar wrote:
> 
> * Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> > From: Will Deacon <will.deacon@xxxxxxx>
> > 
> > lockless_dereference is a nice idea, but its gained little traction in
> > kernel code since it's introduction three years ago. This is partly
> 
> s/its/it
> s/it's/its

Crikey, no idea what happened there!

> > because it's a pain to type, but also because using READ_ONCE instead
> > will work correctly on all architectures apart from Alpha, which is a
> > fully supported but somewhat niche architecture these days.
> > 
> > This patch moves smp_read_barrier_depends() (a NOP on all architectures
> > other than Alpha) from lockless_dereference into READ_ONCE, converts
> > the few actual users over to READ_ONCE and then finally removes
> > lockless_dereference altogether.
> 
> Nit: if we refer to smp_read_barrier_depends() with parentheses (which is the nice 
> thing to do for function-alike symbols), then we should do the same with 
> READ_ONCE() and lockless_dereference() as well.
> 
> Also, could we please split this into three patches:
> 
>  #1: Add smp_read_barrier_depends() to READ_ONCE()
>  #2: Convert all lockless_dereference() users to READ_ONCE()
>  #3: Remove the now unused lockless_dereference() API
> 
> to make it easier to analyze if bisected to, should any problems arise?

Sure, I'll do that now.

Will