Re: [PATCH] lib/atomic64_test: do not build on non-atomic64 systems

[Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>]

On Sun, 24 Oct 2010 09:20:34 -0700 Roland Dreier <rdreier@cisco.com> wrote:

>  > That's only part of the problem.  The following won't build also:
> 
>  > drivers/infiniband/hw
> 
> Interesting... I hadn't looked at that usage before.  Both drivers that
> seem to use atomic64 already depend on 64BIT in Kconfig, so I suspect
> the intersection of 64BIT and !ATOMIC64 is empty?
> 
> But eg drivers/infiniband/hw/qib/qib_rc.c does essentially:
> 
> 	atomic64_t *maddr;
> 	u64 sdata = <something>
> 	...
> 	maddr = (atomic64_t *) qp->r_sge.sge.vaddr;
> 	atomic64_add_return(sdata, maddr)
> 
> is it legit to cast some random address to atomic64_t and expect it to
> work across archs that implement atomic64?

Not really.  If someone implements atomic64 on 32-bit they may 
do it by putting a spinlock in the atomic64_t.  Or they might use
hashed spinlocks, in which case that'll work.

Probably hashed spinlocks, given the (realtively new) convention that
the all-zeroes pattern is a legit way of initialising an atomic_t.