From: Konstantin Khlebnikov <khlebnikov@openvz.org>
To: "linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org" <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
Cc: "Paul E. McKenney" <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>,
Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Subject: RCU: non-atomic assignment to long/pointer variables in gcc
Date: Tue, 15 Jan 2013 14:30:32 +0400 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <50F52FC8.4000701@openvz.org> (raw)
Documentation/atomic_ops.txt (182dd4b277177e8465ad11cd9f85f282946b5578)
says that pointers, longs, ints, and chars are stored and loaded atomically.
But GCC actually may split assignment to 'long' variable into two instructions.
see example in http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=55981
GCC also splits assignments to 'volatile' variables and this is actually a bug in gcc.
volatile unsigned long y;
y = 0x100000001ul;
400728: c7 05 66 06 20 00 01 movl $0x1,0x200666(%rip) # 600d98 <y>
40072f: 00 00 00
400732: c7 05 60 06 20 00 01 movl $0x1,0x200660(%rip) # 600d9c <y+0x4>
400739: 00 00 00
fortunately for y = 0; it generates this:
40071d: 48 c7 05 70 06 20 00 movq $0x0,0x200670(%rip) # 600d98 <y>
400724: 00 00 00 00
Thus NULL is safe, but constant ERR_PTR may be dangerous.
Probably rcu_assign_pointer() should use ACCESS_ONCE() around lvalue, because
splitting assignment for non-volatile variable seems like completely valid,
but this may help only after fixing that bug in GCC.
next reply other threads:[~2013-01-15 10:30 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 4+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2013-01-15 10:30 Konstantin Khlebnikov [this message]
2013-01-15 12:32 ` RCU: non-atomic assignment to long/pointer variables in gcc Paul E. McKenney
2013-01-15 13:07 ` Konstantin Khlebnikov
2013-01-15 16:17 ` Paul E. McKenney
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