Re: [PATCH 0/24] make atomic_read() behave consistently across all architectures

[Satyam Sharma <satyam@infradead.org>]

On Fri, 17 Aug 2007, Herbert Xu wrote:

> On Fri, Aug 17, 2007 at 01:43:27PM +1000, Paul Mackerras wrote:
> >
> > The cost of doing so seems to me to be well down in the noise - 44
> > bytes of extra kernel text on a ppc64 G5 config, and I don't believe
> > the extra few cycles for the occasional extra load would be measurable
> > (they should all hit in the L1 dcache).  I don't mind if x86[-64] have
> > atomic_read/set be nonvolatile and find all the missing barriers, but
> > for now on powerpc, I think that not having to find those missing
> > barriers is worth the 0.00076% increase in kernel text size.
> 
> BTW, the sort of missing barriers that triggered this thread
> aren't that subtle.  It'll result in a simple lock-up if the
> loop condition holds upon entry.  At which point it's fairly
> straightforward to find the culprit.

Not necessarily. A barrier-less buggy code such as below:

	atomic_set(&v, 0);

	... /* some initial code */

	while (atomic_read(&v))
		;

	... /* code that MUST NOT be executed unless v becomes non-zero */

(where v->counter is has no volatile access semantics)

could be generated by the compiler to simply *elid* or *do away* with
the loop itself, thereby making the:

"/* code that MUST NOT be executed unless v becomes non-zero */"

to be executed even when v is zero! That is subtle indeed, and causes
no hard lockups.

Granted, the above IS buggy code. But, the stated objective is to avoid
heisenbugs. And we have driver / subsystem maintainers such as Stefan
coming up and admitting that often a lot of code that's written to use
atomic_read() does assume the read will not be elided by the compiler.

See, I agree, "volatility" semantics != what we often want. However, if
what we want is compiler barrier, for only the object under consideration,
"volatility" semantics aren't really "nonsensical" or anything.
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