linux-kernel - Re: Question on smp_mb__before

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Date:   Wed, 7 Sep 2016 14:51:47 +0100
From:   Will Deacon <will.deacon@....com>
To:     Peter Zijlstra <peterz@...radead.org>
Cc:     Nicholas Piggin <npiggin@...il.com>,
        Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>,
        Oleg Nesterov <oleg@...hat.com>,
        Paul McKenney <paulmck@...ux.vnet.ibm.com>,
        Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@...nel.crashing.org>,
        Michael Ellerman <mpe@...erman.id.au>,
        linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, Ingo Molnar <mingo@...nel.org>,
        Alan Stern <stern@...land.harvard.edu>
Subject: Re: Question on smp_mb__before_spinlock

On Wed, Sep 07, 2016 at 03:23:54PM +0200, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 07, 2016 at 10:17:26PM +1000, Nicholas Piggin wrote:
> > It seems okay, but why not make it a special sched-only function name
> > to prevent it being used in generic code?
> > 
> > I would not mind seeing responsibility for the switch barrier moved to
> > generic context switch code like this (alternative for powerpc reducing
> > number of hwsync instructions was to add documentation and warnings about
> > the barriers in arch dependent and independent code). And pairing it with
> > a spinlock is reasonable.
> > 
> > It may not strictly be an "smp_" style of barrier if MMIO accesses are to
> > be ordered here too, despite critical section may only be providing
> > acquire/release for cacheable memory, so maybe it's slightly more
> > complicated than just cacheable RCsc?
> 
> Interesting idea..
> 
> So I'm not a fan of that raw_spin_lock wrapper, since that would end up
> with a lot more boiler-plate code than just the one extra barrier.
> 
> But moving MMIO/DMA/TLB etc.. barriers into this spinlock might not be a
> good idea, since those are typically fairly heavy barriers, and its
> quite common to call schedule() without ending up in switch_to().
> 
> For PowerPC it works out, since there's only SYNC, no other option
> afaik.
> 
> But ARM/ARM64 will have to do DSB(ISH) instead of DMB(ISH). IA64 would
> need to issue "sync.i" and mips-octeon "synciobdma".
> 
> Will, any idea of the extra cost involved in DSB vs DMB?

DSB is *much* more expensive, since it completes out-of-band communication
such as MMIO accesses and TLB invalidation, as well as plain old memory
accesses.

The only reason we have DSB in our __switch_to code is to complete cache
maintenance in case the task is going to migrate to another CPU; there's
just no way to know that at the point we need to do the barrier :(

Will