Re: KCSAN: data-race in __alloc_file / __alloc_file

[Linus Torvalds]

On Fri, Nov 8, 2019 at 9:56 AM Eric Dumazet <edumazet@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> BTW, I would love an efficient ADD_ONCE(variable, value)
>
> Using WRITE_ONCE(variable, variable + value) is not good, since it can
> not use the optimized instructions operating directly on memory.

So I'm having a hard time seeing how this could possibly ever be valid.

Is this a "writer is locked, readers are unlocked" case or something?

Because we don't really have any sane way to do that any more
efficiently, unless we'd have to add new architecture-specific
functions for it (like we do have fo the percpu ops).

Anyway, if you have a really hot case you care about, maybe you could
convince the gcc people to just add it as a peephole optimization?
Right now, gcc ends up doing some strange things with volatiles, and
basically disables a lot of stuff over them. But with a test-case,
maybe you can convince somebody that certain optimizations are still
fine. A "read+add+write" really does the exact same accesses as an
add-to-memory instruction, but gcc has some logic to disable that
instruction fusion.

          Linus