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Date:   Tue, 17 Jul 2018 20:42:55 +0200
From:   Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
To:     "Paul E. McKenney" <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Cc:     Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>,
        Michael Ellerman <mpe@ellerman.id.au>,
        Alan Stern <stern@rowland.harvard.edu>,
        andrea.parri@amarulasolutions.com,
        Will Deacon <will.deacon@arm.com>,
        Akira Yokosawa <akiyks@gmail.com>,
        Boqun Feng <boqun.feng@gmail.com>,
        Daniel Lustig <dlustig@nvidia.com>,
        David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com>,
        Jade Alglave <j.alglave@ucl.ac.uk>,
        Luc Maranget <luc.maranget@inria.fr>,
        Nick Piggin <npiggin@gmail.com>,
        Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH v2] tools/memory-model: Add extra ordering for locks and
 remove it for ordinary release/acquire
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On Tue, Jul 17, 2018 at 11:33:41AM -0700, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 17, 2018 at 09:19:15AM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> > 
> > In particular, I find:
> > 
> >   "isync is not a memory barrier instruction, but the
> > load-compare-conditional branch-isync sequence can provide this
> > ordering property"
> > 
> > so why are you doing "sync/lwsync", when it sounds like "isync/lwsync"
> > (for lock/unlock) is the right thing and would already give memory
> > barrier semantics?
> 
> The PowerPC guys will correct me if I miss something here...
> 
> The isync provides ordering roughly similar to lwsync, but nowhere near
> as strong as sync, and it is sync that would be needed to cause lock
> acquisition to provide full ordering.  The reason for using lwsync instead
> of isync is that the former proved to be faster on recent hardware.
> The reason that the kernel still has the ability to instead generate
> isync instructions is that some older PowerPC hardware does not provide
> the lwsync instruction.  If the hardware does support lwsync, the isync
> instructions are overwritten with lwsync at boot time.

Isn't ISYNC the instruction-sync pipeline flush instruction? That is
used as an smp_rmb() here to, together with the control dependency from the
LL/SC, to form a LOAD->{LOAD,STORE} (aka LOAD-ACQUIRE) ordering?

Where LWSYNC provides a TSO like ordering and SYNC provides a full
transitive barrier aka. smp_mb() (althgouh I think it is strictly
stronger than smp_mb() since it also implies completion, which smp_mb()
does not).

And since both LL/SC-CTRL + ISYNC / LWSYNC are strictly CPU local, they
cannot be used to create RCsc ordering.