locking/atomic: scripts: Clarify ordering of conditional atomics

Conditional atomic operations (e.g. cmpxchg()) only provide ordering
when the condition holds; when the condition does not hold, the location
is not modified and relaxed ordering is provided. Where ordering is
needed for failed conditional atomics, it is necessary to use
smp_mb__before_atomic() and/or smp_mb__after_atomic().

This is explained tersely in memory-barriers.txt, and is implied but not
explicitly stated in the kerneldoc comments for the conditional
operations. The lack of an explicit statement has lead to some off-list
queries about the ordering semantics of failing conditional operations,
so evidently this is confusing.

Update the kerneldoc comments to explicitly describe the lack of ordering
for failed conditional atomic operations.

For most conditional atomic operations, this is written as:

  | If (${condition}), atomically updates @v to (${new}) with ${desc_order} ordering.
  | Otherwise, @v is not modified and relaxed ordering is provided.

For the try_cmpxchg() operations, this is written as:

  | If (${condition}), atomically updates @v to @new with ${desc_order} ordering.
  | Otherwise, @v is not modified, @old is updated to the current value of @v,
  | and relaxed ordering is provided.

Signed-off-by: Mark Rutland <mark.rutland@arm.com>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
Reviewed-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@kernel.org>
Reviewed-by: Nhat Pham <nphamcs@gmail.com>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20240209124010.2096198-1-mark.rutland@arm.com

1 files changed, 2 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/scripts/atomic/kerneldoc/try_cmpxchg b/scripts/atomic/kerneldoc/try_cmpxchg
index 296553206c06..3ccff29538f5 100644
--- a/scripts/atomic/kerneldoc/try_cmpxchg
+++ b/scripts/atomic/kerneldoc/try_cmpxchg
@@ -6,7 +6,8 @@ cat <<EOF
  * @new: ${int} value to assign
  *
  * If (@v == @old), atomically updates @v to @new with ${desc_order} ordering.
- * Otherwise, updates @old to the current value of @v.
+ * Otherwise, @v is not modified, @old is updated to the current value of @v,
+ * and relaxed ordering is provided.
  *
  * ${desc_noinstr}
  *