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Date:      Thu, 1 Oct 2009 15:56:06 +0200
From:      Rafal Jaworowski <raj@semihalf.com>
To:        Stanislav Sedov <stas@FreeBSD.org>
Cc:        Attilio Rao <attilio@freebsd.org>, svn-src-head@freebsd.org, svn-src-all@freebsd.org, src-committers@freebsd.org, Robert Watson <rwatson@freebsd.org>
Subject:   Re: svn commit: r197643 - in head/sys: kern sys
Message-ID:  <2B51434B-9A1D-4711-9648-1A49B125C785@semihalf.com>
In-Reply-To: <20091001174130.0d3bec21.stas@FreeBSD.org>
References:  <200909301326.n8UDQVB1016396@svn.freebsd.org> <alpine.BSF.2.00.0909301836380.57723@fledge.watson.org> <3bbf2fe10910010621u72d0f692h8f9c4a783667253d@mail.gmail.com> <20091001174130.0d3bec21.stas@FreeBSD.org>

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On 2009-10-01, at 15:41, Stanislav Sedov wrote:

> On Thu, 1 Oct 2009 15:21:34 +0200
> Attilio Rao <attilio@freebsd.org> mentioned:
>
>> 2009/9/30 Robert Watson <rwatson@freebsd.org>:
>>> On Wed, 30 Sep 2009, Attilio Rao wrote:
>>>
>>>> When releasing a read/shared lock we need to use a write memory  
>>>> barrier
>>>> in order to avoid, on architectures which doesn't have strong  
>>>> ordered
>>>> writes, CPU instructions reordering.
>>>
>>> Hi Attilio (Fabio, et al),
>>>
>>> Nice catch!  Are we aware of specific reported problems that can  
>>> be laid at
>>> the feet of this bug, or was this more of a "wait a moment,  
>>> shouldn't there
>>> be a barrier there?".  Could you comment on the scope of this  
>>> problem across
>>> architectures we support?
>>
>> A possible problem related to that would be MD specific and not on
>> ia32/amd64 because there the barriers and simple atomics are the  
>> same.
>> Given that sun4v suffers of serveral other problems, that MIPS has no
>> SMP support, you would find it only for arm, ia64 and sparc
>> eventually. Thus I'm not aware of any problem which can be  
>> reconducted
>> to that.
>>
>
> Actually, MIPS is going to grow SMP support really soon, and ARM cpus
> do not do reordering until ARMv7 afaik.  So this should not result in
> any real problems on ARM too.

Even past generation ARM can do out-of-order execution: see Marvell  
Feroceon cores which are v5 ISA compatible, although their internal  
microarchitecture has extended features like this.

> OTOH, I suspect powerpc may be affected.  I'm not sure if any of the  
> models
> we support perform OOO, though.

PowerPC is inherently OOOE.

Rafal




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