linux-kernel - Re: bit fields && data tearing

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Date:	Mon, 08 Sep 2014 19:30:29 -0700
From:	"H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@...or.com>
To:	James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@...senPartnership.com>
CC:	paulmck@...ux.vnet.ibm.com,
	Peter Hurley <peter@...leysoftware.com>,
	One Thousand Gnomes <gnomes@...rguk.ukuu.org.uk>,
	Jakub Jelinek <jakub@...hat.com>,
	Mikael Pettersson <mikpelinux@...il.com>,
	Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@...nel.crashing.org>,
	Richard Henderson <rth@...ddle.net>,
	Oleg Nesterov <oleg@...hat.com>,
	Miroslav Franc <mfranc@...hat.com>,
	Paul Mackerras <paulus@...ba.org>,
	linuxppc-dev@...ts.ozlabs.org, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org,
	linux-arch@...r.kernel.org, Tony Luck <tony.luck@...el.com>,
	linux-ia64@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: bit fields && data tearing

On 09/08/2014 03:39 PM, James Bottomley wrote:
> 
> I don't understand what you mean by "pass each other".  Atomicity
> guarantees are not ordering guarantees in a SMP environment.  The
> guarantee is that if you follow the rules when two CPUs update the same
> natural width aligned object simultaneously using the same primitive,
> the result is either one or the other of their updates.  Which one wins
> (the ordering) isn't defined.
> 

I'm trying to figure out why it would possibly make a difference in any
kind of sane system if gcc fuses accesses.

Assuming bigendian for the moment, I would expect that if CPU 1 does a
write of 0x01020304 to address 0 and CPU 2 does a write of 0x0506 to
address 2, that the end result would be either 0x01020304 or 0x01020506.
 Similarly, I would expect that if these operations are both done on the
same CPU in that order, that the result would unambiguously be 0x01020506.

I would strongly suspect an architecture which does not provide those
guarantees is an outlier.

	-hpa


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