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authorPeter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>2017-06-12 14:50:27 +0200
committerIngo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>2017-08-10 12:29:00 +0200
commit706eeb3e9c6f032f2d22a1c658624cfb6ace61d4 (patch)
tree5739662f21de8b9619e83f95987a2f81cc369ee7 /Documentation/memory-barriers.txt
parent450f9689f294c331c56ec37d68302ccc19c7caa2 (diff)
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Documentation/locking/atomic: Add documents for new atomic_t APIs
Since we've vastly expanded the atomic_t interface in recent years the existing documentation is woefully out of date and people seem to get confused a bit. Start a new document to hopefully better explain the current state of affairs. The old atomic_ops.txt also covers bitmaps and a few more details so this is not a full replacement and we'll therefore keep that document around until such a time that we've managed to write more text to cover its entire. Also please, ReST people, go away. Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra (Intel) <peterz@infradead.org> Cc: Boqun Feng <boqun.feng@gmail.com> Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> Cc: Paul McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com> Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org> Cc: Randy Dunlap <rdunlap@infradead.org> Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de> Cc: Will Deacon <will.deacon@arm.com> Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
Diffstat (limited to 'Documentation/memory-barriers.txt')
-rw-r--r--Documentation/memory-barriers.txt96
1 files changed, 7 insertions, 89 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/memory-barriers.txt b/Documentation/memory-barriers.txt
index c4ddfcd5ee32..9f34364922c8 100644
--- a/Documentation/memory-barriers.txt
+++ b/Documentation/memory-barriers.txt
@@ -498,11 +498,11 @@ And a couple of implicit varieties:
This means that ACQUIRE acts as a minimal "acquire" operation and
RELEASE acts as a minimal "release" operation.
-A subset of the atomic operations described in core-api/atomic_ops.rst have
-ACQUIRE and RELEASE variants in addition to fully-ordered and relaxed (no
-barrier semantics) definitions. For compound atomics performing both a load
-and a store, ACQUIRE semantics apply only to the load and RELEASE semantics
-apply only to the store portion of the operation.
+A subset of the atomic operations described in atomic_t.txt have ACQUIRE and
+RELEASE variants in addition to fully-ordered and relaxed (no barrier
+semantics) definitions. For compound atomics performing both a load and a
+store, ACQUIRE semantics apply only to the load and RELEASE semantics apply
+only to the store portion of the operation.
Memory barriers are only required where there's a possibility of interaction
between two CPUs or between a CPU and a device. If it can be guaranteed that
@@ -1876,8 +1876,7 @@ There are some more advanced barrier functions:
This makes sure that the death mark on the object is perceived to be set
*before* the reference counter is decremented.
- See Documentation/core-api/atomic_ops.rst for more information. See the
- "Atomic operations" subsection for information on where to use these.
+ See Documentation/atomic_{t,bitops}.txt for more information.
(*) lockless_dereference();
@@ -2503,88 +2502,7 @@ operations are noted specially as some of them imply full memory barriers and
some don't, but they're very heavily relied on as a group throughout the
kernel.
-Any atomic operation that modifies some state in memory and returns information
-about the state (old or new) implies an SMP-conditional general memory barrier
-(smp_mb()) on each side of the actual operation (with the exception of
-explicit lock operations, described later). These include:
-
- xchg();
- atomic_xchg(); atomic_long_xchg();
- atomic_inc_return(); atomic_long_inc_return();
- atomic_dec_return(); atomic_long_dec_return();
- atomic_add_return(); atomic_long_add_return();
- atomic_sub_return(); atomic_long_sub_return();
- atomic_inc_and_test(); atomic_long_inc_and_test();
- atomic_dec_and_test(); atomic_long_dec_and_test();
- atomic_sub_and_test(); atomic_long_sub_and_test();
- atomic_add_negative(); atomic_long_add_negative();
- test_and_set_bit();
- test_and_clear_bit();
- test_and_change_bit();
-
- /* when succeeds */
- cmpxchg();
- atomic_cmpxchg(); atomic_long_cmpxchg();
- atomic_add_unless(); atomic_long_add_unless();
-
-These are used for such things as implementing ACQUIRE-class and RELEASE-class
-operations and adjusting reference counters towards object destruction, and as
-such the implicit memory barrier effects are necessary.
-
-
-The following operations are potential problems as they do _not_ imply memory
-barriers, but might be used for implementing such things as RELEASE-class
-operations:
-
- atomic_set();
- set_bit();
- clear_bit();
- change_bit();
-
-With these the appropriate explicit memory barrier should be used if necessary
-(smp_mb__before_atomic() for instance).
-
-
-The following also do _not_ imply memory barriers, and so may require explicit
-memory barriers under some circumstances (smp_mb__before_atomic() for
-instance):
-
- atomic_add();
- atomic_sub();
- atomic_inc();
- atomic_dec();
-
-If they're used for statistics generation, then they probably don't need memory
-barriers, unless there's a coupling between statistical data.
-
-If they're used for reference counting on an object to control its lifetime,
-they probably don't need memory barriers because either the reference count
-will be adjusted inside a locked section, or the caller will already hold
-sufficient references to make the lock, and thus a memory barrier unnecessary.
-
-If they're used for constructing a lock of some description, then they probably
-do need memory barriers as a lock primitive generally has to do things in a
-specific order.
-
-Basically, each usage case has to be carefully considered as to whether memory
-barriers are needed or not.
-
-The following operations are special locking primitives:
-
- test_and_set_bit_lock();
- clear_bit_unlock();
- __clear_bit_unlock();
-
-These implement ACQUIRE-class and RELEASE-class operations. These should be
-used in preference to other operations when implementing locking primitives,
-because their implementations can be optimised on many architectures.
-
-[!] Note that special memory barrier primitives are available for these
-situations because on some CPUs the atomic instructions used imply full memory
-barriers, and so barrier instructions are superfluous in conjunction with them,
-and in such cases the special barrier primitives will be no-ops.
-
-See Documentation/core-api/atomic_ops.rst for more information.
+See Documentation/atomic_t.txt for more information.
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