linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH v2] tools/memory-model: Add extra ordering for locks and remove it for ordinary release/acquire

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Date:   Tue, 17 Jul 2018 21:40:01 +0200
From:   Andrea Parri <andrea.parri@...rulasolutions.com>
To:     "Paul E. McKenney" <paulmck@...ux.vnet.ibm.com>
Cc:     Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>,
        Michael Ellerman <mpe@...erman.id.au>,
        Peter Zijlstra <peterz@...radead.org>,
        Alan Stern <stern@...land.harvard.edu>,
        Will Deacon <will.deacon@....com>,
        Akira Yokosawa <akiyks@...il.com>,
        Boqun Feng <boqun.feng@...il.com>,
        Daniel Lustig <dlustig@...dia.com>,
        David Howells <dhowells@...hat.com>,
        Jade Alglave <j.alglave@....ac.uk>,
        Luc Maranget <luc.maranget@...ia.fr>,
        Nick Piggin <npiggin@...il.com>,
        Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH v2] tools/memory-model: Add extra ordering for locks and
 remove it for ordinary release/acquire

> > That said, I don't understand the powerpc memory ordering. I thought
> > the rules were "isync on lock, lwsync on unlock".
> > 
> > That's what the AIX docs imply, at least.
> > 
> > In particular, I find:
> > 
> >   "isync is not a memory barrier instruction, but the
> > load-compare-conditional branch-isync sequence can provide this
> > ordering property"
> > 
> > so why are you doing "sync/lwsync", when it sounds like "isync/lwsync"
> > (for lock/unlock) is the right thing and would already give memory
> > barrier semantics?
> 
> The PowerPC guys will correct me if I miss something here...

[Same here.]


> 
> The isync provides ordering roughly similar to lwsync, but nowhere near
> as strong as sync, and it is sync that would be needed to cause lock
> acquisition to provide full ordering.

IIRC, ctrl+isync is even *weaker* than lwsync in certain respects, e.g.,
the former doesn't provide A-cumulativity according to the architectural
intent.


>The reason for using lwsync instead
> of isync is that the former proved to be faster on recent hardware.

Interesting; can you add some references about this?

  Andrea


> The reason that the kernel still has the ability to instead generate
> isync instructions is that some older PowerPC hardware does not provide
> the lwsync instruction.  If the hardware does support lwsync, the isync
> instructions are overwritten with lwsync at boot time.
> 
> 							Thanx, Paul
>