lkml.org 
[lkml]   [2006]   [Mar]   [7]   [last100]   RSS Feed
Views: [wrap][no wrap]   [headers]  [forward] 
 
Messages in this thread
/
From
SubjectRe: [PATCH] Document Linux's memory barriers
Date
On Tuesday 07 March 2006 18:40, David Howells wrote:

> +Older and less complex CPUs will perform memory accesses in exactly the order
> +specified, so if one is given the following piece of code:
> +
> + a = *A;
> + *B = b;
> + c = *C;
> + d = *D;
> + *E = e;
> +
> +It can be guaranteed that it will complete the memory access for each
> +instruction before moving on to the next line, leading to a definite sequence
> +of operations on the bus:

Actually gcc is free to reorder it
(often it will not when it cannot prove that they don't alias, but sometimes
it can)

> +
> + Consider, for example, an ethernet chipset such as the AMD PCnet32. It
> + presents to the CPU an "address register" and a bunch of "data registers".
> + The way it's accessed is to write the index of the internal register you
> + want to access to the address register, and then read or write the
> + appropriate data register to access the chip's internal register:
> +
> + *ADR = ctl_reg_3;
> + reg = *DATA;

You're not supposed to do it this way anyways. The official way to access
MMIO space is using read/write[bwlq]

Haven't read all of it sorry, but thanks for the work of documenting
it.

-Andi

-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/

\
 
 \ /
  Last update: 2006-03-07 19:04    [W:0.179 / U:0.596 seconds]
©2003-2020 Jasper Spaans|hosted at Digital Ocean and TransIP|Read the blog|Advertise on this site