linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH] x86: Add an explicit barrier() to clflushopt()

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Date:	Tue, 12 Jan 2016 20:39:47 -0800
From:	Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>
To:	Andy Lutomirski <luto@...capital.net>
Cc:	Chris Wilson <chris@...is-wilson.co.uk>,
	"H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@...or.com>,
	"linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org" <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
	Ross Zwisler <ross.zwisler@...ux.intel.com>,
	"H . Peter Anvin" <hpa@...ux.intel.com>,
	Borislav Petkov <bp@...en8.de>,
	Brian Gerst <brgerst@...il.com>,
	Denys Vlasenko <dvlasenk@...hat.com>,
	Thomas Gleixner <tglx@...utronix.de>,
	Imre Deak <imre.deak@...el.com>,
	Daniel Vetter <daniel.vetter@...ll.ch>,
	DRI <dri-devel@...ts.freedesktop.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH] x86: Add an explicit barrier() to clflushopt()

On Tue, Jan 12, 2016 at 6:42 PM, Andy Lutomirski <luto@...capital.net> wrote:
>
> Since barriers are on my mind: how strong a barrier is needed to
> prevent cache fills from being speculated across the barrier?

I don't think there are *any* architectural guarantees.

I suspect that a real serializing instruction should do it. But I
don't think even that is guaranteed.

Non-coherent IO is crazy. I really thought Intel had learnt their
lesson, and finally made all the GPU's coherent. I'm afraid to even
ask why Chris is actually working on some sh*t that requires clflush.

In general, you should probably do something nasty like

 - flush before starting IO that generates data (to make sure you have
no dirty cachelines that will write back and mess up)

 - start the IO, wait for it to complete

 - flush after finishing IO that generates the data (to make sure you
have no speculative clean cachelines with stale data)

 - read the data now.

Of course, what people actually end up doing to avoid all this is to
mark the memory noncacheable.

And finally, the *correct* thing is to not have crap hardware, and
have IO be cache coherent. Things that don't do that are shit. Really.

                 Linus