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To:     Leonardo =?iso-8859-1?Q?Br=E1s?= <leobras@redhat.com>
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Subject: Re: [RFC PATCH v5 5/5] riscv/cmpxchg: Implement xchg for variables of size 1 and 2
Date:   Tue,  5 Dec 2023 21:56:44 -0300
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From: Leonardo Bras <leobras@redhat.com>

On Wed, Aug 30, 2023 at 06:59:46PM -0300, Leonardo Br?s wrote:
> On Thu, 2023-08-10 at 09:23 -0700, Palmer Dabbelt wrote:
> > On Thu, 10 Aug 2023 09:04:04 PDT (-0700), leobras@redhat.com wrote:
> > > On Thu, 2023-08-10 at 08:51 +0200, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> > > > On Thu, Aug 10, 2023, at 06:03, Leonardo Bras wrote:
> > > > > xchg for variables of size 1-byte and 2-bytes is not yet available for
> > > > > riscv, even though its present in other architectures such as arm64 and
> > > > > x86. This could lead to not being able to implement some locking mechanisms
> > > > > or requiring some rework to make it work properly.
> > > > > 
> > > > > Implement 1-byte and 2-bytes xchg in order to achieve parity with other
> > > > > architectures.
> > > > > 
> > > > > Signed-off-by: Leonardo Bras <leobras@redhat.com>
> > > > 
> > > 
> > > Hello Arnd Bergmann, thanks for reviewing!
> > > 
> > > > Parity with other architectures by itself is not a reason to do this,
> > > > in particular the other architectures you listed have the instructions
> > > > in hardware while riscv does not.
> > > 
> > > Sure, I understand RISC-V don't have native support for xchg on variables of
> > > size < 4B. My argument is that it's nice to have even an emulated version for
> > > this in case any future mechanism wants to use it.
> > > 
> > > Not having it may mean we won't be able to enable given mechanism in RISC-V. 
> > 
> > IIUC the ask is to have a user within the kernel for these functions.  
> > That's the general thing to do, and last time this came up there was no 
> > in-kernel use of it -- the qspinlock stuff would, but we haven't enabled 
> > it yet because we're worried about the performance/fairness stuff that 
> > other ports have seen and nobody's got concrete benchmarks yet (though 
> > there's another patch set out that I haven't had time to look through, 
> > so that may have changed).
> > 
> > So if something uses these I'm happy to go look closer.
> 
> IIUC patches 4 & 5 will be used by qspinlock, which may not be done yet, so we
> don't have an use for them for the time being.
> 
> Otherwise, any comments on patches 1, 2 & 3?

ping

> 
> > 
> > > > Emulating the small xchg() through cmpxchg() is particularly tricky
> > > > since it's easy to run into a case where this does not guarantee
> > > > forward progress.
> > > > 
> > > 
> > > Didn't get this part:
> > > By "emulating small xchg() through cmpxchg()", did you mean like emulating an
> > > xchg (usually 1 instruction) with lr & sc (same used in cmpxchg) ?
> > > 
> > > If so, yeah, it's a fair point: in some extreme case we could have multiple
> > > threads accessing given cacheline and have sc always failing. On the other hand,
> > > there are 2 arguments on that:
> > > 
> > > 1 - Other architectures, (such as powerpc, arm and arm64 without LSE atomics)
> > > also seem to rely in this mechanism for every xchg size. Another archs like csky
> > > and loongarch use asm that look like mine to handle size < 4B xchg. 
> > >     
> > > 
> > > >  This is also something that almost no architecture
> > > > specific code relies on (generic qspinlock being a notable exception).
> > > > 
> > > 
> > > 2 - As you mentioned, there should be very little code that will actually make
> > > use of xchg for vars < 4B, so it should be safe to assume its fine to not
> > > guarantee forward progress for those rare usages (like some of above mentioned
> > > archs).
> > > 
> > > > I would recommend just dropping this patch from the series, at least
> > > > until there is a need for it.
> > > 
> > > While I agree this is a valid point, I believe its more interesting to have it
> > > implemented if any future mechanism wants to make use of this. 
> > > 
> > > 
> > > Thanks!
> > > Leo
> > 
>