Documentation/memory-barriers.txt: Downgrade UNLOCK+BLOCK

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Historically, an UNLOCK+LOCK pair executed by one CPU, by one
task, or on a given lock variable has implied a full memory
barrier.  In a recent LKML thread, the wisdom of this historical
approach was called into question:
http://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-mm/msg65653.html, in part due
to the memory-order complexities of low-handoff-overhead queued
locks on x86 systems.

This patch therefore removes this guarantee from the
documentation, and further documents how to restore it via a new
smp_mb__after_unlock_lock() primitive.

Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Reviewed-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: <linux-arch@vger.kernel.org>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1386799151-2219-6-git-send-email-paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>

...

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Paul E. McKenney 2013-12-11 13:59:09 -08:00 • committed by Ingo Molnar

parent 01352fb816

commit 17eb88e068

1 changed files with 69 additions and 15 deletions

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