Re: [PATCH tip/core/rcu 21/21] drivers/vhost: Remove now-redundant read_barrier_depends()

[Peter Zijlstra]

On Tue, Dec 05, 2017 at 08:57:46PM +0200, Michael S. Tsirkin wrote:

> I don't see WRITE_ONCE inserting any barriers, release or
> write.

Correct, never claimed there was.

Just saying that:

	obj = READ_ONCE(*foo);
	val = READ_ONCE(obj->val);

Never needs a barrier (except on Alpha and we want to make that go
away). Simply because a CPU needs to complete the load of @obj before it
can compute the address &obj->val. Thus the second load _must_ come
after the first load and we get LOAD-LOAD ordering.

Alpha messing that up is a royal pain, and Alpha not being an
active/living architecture is just not worth the pain of keeping this in
the generic model.