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SubjectRe: [RFC PATCH] LKMM: Add ctrl_dep() macro for control dependency
On Wed, Oct 13, 2021 at 10:14:31PM -0400, Alan Stern wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 13, 2021 at 05:01:04PM -0700, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> > On Sun, Oct 10, 2021 at 04:02:02PM +0200, Florian Weimer wrote:
> > > * Linus Torvalds:
> > >
> > > > On Fri, Oct 1, 2021 at 9:26 AM Florian Weimer <fweimer@redhat.com> wrote:
> > > >>
> > > >> Will any conditional branch do, or is it necessary that it depends in
> > > >> some way on the data read?
> > > >
> > > > The condition needs to be dependent on the read.
> > > >
> > > > (Easy way to see it: if the read isn't related to the conditional or
> > > > write data/address, the read could just be delayed to after the
> > > > condition and the store had been done).
> > >
> > > That entirely depends on how the hardware is specified to work. And
> > > the hardware could recognize certain patterns as always producing the
> > > same condition codes, e.g., AND with zero. Do such tests still count?
> > > It depends on what the specification says.
> > >
> > > What I really dislike about this: Operators like & and < now have side
> > > effects, and is no longer possible to reason about arithmetic
> > > expressions in isolation.
> >
> > Is there a reasonable syntax that might help with these issues?
> >
> > Yes, I know, we for sure have conflicting constraints on "reasonable"
> > on copy on this email. What else is new? ;-)
> >
> > I could imagine a tag of some sort on the load and store, linking the
> > operations that needed to be ordered. You would also want that same
> > tag on any conditional operators along the way? Or would the presence
> > of the tags on the load and store suffice?
>
> Here's a easy cop-out. Imagine a version of READ_ONCE that is
> equivalent to:
>
> a normal READ_ONCE on TSO architectures,
>
> a load-acquire on more weakly ordered architectures.
>
> Call it READ_ONCE_FOR_COND, for the sake of argument. Then as long as
> people are careful to use READ_ONCE_FOR_COND when loading the values
> that a conditional expression depends on, and WRITE_ONCE for the
> important stores in the branches of the "if" statement, all
> architectures will have the desired ordering. (In fact, if there are
> multiple loads involved in the condition then only the last one has to
> be READ_ONCE_FOR_COND; the others can just be READ_ONCE.)
>
> Of course, this is not optimal on non-TSO archictecture. That's why I
> called it a cop-out. But at least it is simple and easy.

That is the ARMv8 approach in CONFIG_LTO=y kernels. ;-)

Thanx, Paul

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