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authorLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>2015-11-03 17:22:17 -0800
committerLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>2015-11-03 17:22:17 -0800
commit105ff3cbf225036b75a6a46c96d1ddce8e7bdc66 (patch)
treed37498ac55c638a2a4b4083bdc1adac74c55f5c1 /kernel/events
parentd63a9788650fcd999b34584316afee6bd4378f19 (diff)
atomic: remove all traces of READ_ONCE_CTRL() and atomic*_read_ctrl()
This seems to be a mis-reading of how alpha memory ordering works, and is not backed up by the alpha architecture manual. The helper functions don't do anything special on any other architectures, and the arguments that support them being safe on other architectures also argue that they are safe on alpha. Basically, the "control dependency" is between a previous read and a subsequent write that is dependent on the value read. Even if the subsequent write is actually done speculatively, there is no way that such a speculative write could be made visible to other cpu's until it has been committed, which requires validating the speculation. Note that most weakely ordered architectures (very much including alpha) do not guarantee any ordering relationship between two loads that depend on each other on a control dependency: read A if (val == 1) read B because the conditional may be predicted, and the "read B" may be speculatively moved up to before reading the value A. So we require the user to insert a smp_rmb() between the two accesses to be correct: read A; if (A == 1) smp_rmb() read B Alpha is further special in that it can break that ordering even if the *address* of B depends on the read of A, because the cacheline that is read later may be stale unless you have a memory barrier in between the pointer read and the read of the value behind a pointer: read ptr read offset(ptr) whereas all other weakly ordered architectures guarantee that the data dependency (as opposed to just a control dependency) will order the two accesses. As a result, alpha needs a "smp_read_barrier_depends()" in between those two reads for them to be ordered. The coontrol dependency that "READ_ONCE_CTRL()" and "atomic_read_ctrl()" had was a control dependency to a subsequent *write*, however, and nobody can finalize such a subsequent write without having actually done the read. And were you to write such a value to a "stale" cacheline (the way the unordered reads came to be), that would seem to lose the write entirely. So the things that make alpha able to re-order reads even more aggressively than other weak architectures do not seem to be relevant for a subsequent write. Alpha memory ordering may be strange, but there's no real indication that it is *that* strange. Also, the alpha architecture reference manual very explicitly talks about the definition of "Dependence Constraints" in section 5.6.1.7, where a preceding read dominates a subsequent write. Such a dependence constraint admittedly does not impose a BEFORE (alpha architecture term for globally visible ordering), but it does guarantee that there can be no "causal loop". I don't see how you could avoid such a loop if another cpu could see the stored value and then impact the value of the first read. Put another way: the read and the write could not be seen as being out of order wrt other cpus. So I do not see how these "x_ctrl()" functions can currently be necessary. I may have to eat my words at some point, but in the absense of clear proof that alpha actually needs this, or indeed even an explanation of how alpha could _possibly_ need it, I do not believe these functions are called for. And if it turns out that alpha really _does_ need a barrier for this case, that barrier still should not be "smp_read_barrier_depends()". We'd have to make up some new speciality barrier just for alpha, along with the documentation for why it really is necessary. Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl> Cc: Paul E McKenney <paulmck@us.ibm.com> Cc: Dmitry Vyukov <dvyukov@google.com> Cc: Will Deacon <will.deacon@arm.com> Cc: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Diffstat (limited to 'kernel/events')
-rw-r--r--kernel/events/ring_buffer.c2
1 files changed, 1 insertions, 1 deletions
diff --git a/kernel/events/ring_buffer.c b/kernel/events/ring_buffer.c
index 182bc30899d5..b5d1ea79c595 100644
--- a/kernel/events/ring_buffer.c
+++ b/kernel/events/ring_buffer.c
@@ -141,7 +141,7 @@ int perf_output_begin(struct perf_output_handle *handle,
perf_output_get_handle(handle);
do {
- tail = READ_ONCE_CTRL(rb->user_page->data_tail);
+ tail = READ_ONCE(rb->user_page->data_tail);
offset = head = local_read(&rb->head);
if (!rb->overwrite &&
unlikely(CIRC_SPACE(head, tail, perf_data_size(rb)) < size))