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authorAnton Vorontsov <cbouatmailru@gmail.com>2008-07-30 02:05:23 +0400
committerAnton Vorontsov <cbouatmailru@gmail.com>2008-07-30 02:05:23 +0400
commit9fec6060d9e48ed7db0dac0e16d0f0f0e615b7f6 (patch)
tree74b41f31a08f6500ff3dfcf64ba21e2d9a8e87e5 /Documentation/memory-barriers.txt
parentfece418418f51e92dd7e67e17c5e3fe5a28d3279 (diff)
parent6e86841d05f371b5b9b86ce76c02aaee83352298 (diff)
Merge branch 'master' of /home/cbou/linux-2.6
Conflicts: drivers/power/Kconfig drivers/power/Makefile
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diff --git a/Documentation/memory-barriers.txt b/Documentation/memory-barriers.txt
index e5a819a4f0c9..f5b7127f54ac 100644
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+++ b/Documentation/memory-barriers.txt
@@ -994,7 +994,17 @@ The Linux kernel has eight basic CPU memory barriers:
DATA DEPENDENCY read_barrier_depends() smp_read_barrier_depends()
-All CPU memory barriers unconditionally imply compiler barriers.
+All memory barriers except the data dependency barriers imply a compiler
+barrier. Data dependencies do not impose any additional compiler ordering.
+
+Aside: In the case of data dependencies, the compiler would be expected to
+issue the loads in the correct order (eg. `a[b]` would have to load the value
+of b before loading a[b]), however there is no guarantee in the C specification
+that the compiler may not speculate the value of b (eg. is equal to 1) and load
+a before b (eg. tmp = a[1]; if (b != 1) tmp = a[b]; ). There is also the
+problem of a compiler reloading b after having loaded a[b], thus having a newer
+copy of b than a[b]. A consensus has not yet been reached about these problems,
+however the ACCESS_ONCE macro is a good place to start looking.
SMP memory barriers are reduced to compiler barriers on uniprocessor compiled
systems because it is assumed that a CPU will appear to be self-consistent,