linux-kernel - thp and memory barrier assumptions

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Message-ID: <1343334698.32120.11.camel@twins>
Date:	Thu, 26 Jul 2012 22:31:38 +0200
From:	Peter Zijlstra <peterz@...radead.org>
To:	Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@...hat.com>,
	Rik van Riel <riel@...hat.com>
Cc:	Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
	paulmck <paulmck@...ux.vnet.ibm.com>,
	Oleg Nesterov <oleg@...hat.com>,
	linux-kernel <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
	Hugh Dickins <hughd@...gle.com>
Subject: thp and memory barrier assumptions


__do_huge_pmd_anonymous_page() contains:

                /*
                 * The spinlocking to take the lru_lock inside
                 * page_add_new_anon_rmap() acts as a full memory
                 * barrier to be sure clear_huge_page writes become
                 * visible after the set_pmd_at() write.
                 */
                page_add_new_anon_rmap(page, vma, haddr);


page_add_new_anon_rmap() doesn't look to actually do a LOCK+UNLOCK
except for unevictable pages.

But even if it did do an unconditional LOCK+UNLOCK that doesn't make a
full memory barrier, see Documentation/memory-barriers.txt.

In particular:

        *A = a;
        LOCK
        UNLOCK
        *B = b;

may occur as:

        LOCK, STORE *B, STORE *A, UNLOCK

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