Re: [PATCH v8 4/4] qrwlock: Use smp_store_release() in write_unlock()

[Richard Henderson <rth@twiddle.net>]

On 01/14/2014 09:08 AM, Matt Turner wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 14, 2014 at 3:03 AM, Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org> wrote:
>> On Tue, Jan 14, 2014 at 10:28:23AM +0800, Daniel J Blueman wrote:
>>>> Peter,
>>>>
>>>> I found out that the build failure was caused by the fact that the
>>>> __native_word() macro (used internally by compiletime_assert_atomic())
>>>> allows only a size of 4 or 8 for x86-64. The data type that I used is a
>>>> byte. Is there a reason why byte and short are not considered native?
>>>
>>> It seems likely it was implemented like that since there was no existing
>>> need; long can be relied on as the largest native type, so this should
>>> suffice and works here:
>>
>> There's Alphas that cannot actually atomically adres a byte; I do not
>> konw if Linux cares about them, but if it does, we cannot in fact rely
>> on this in generic primitives like this.
> 
> That's right, and thanks for the heads-up. Alpha can only address 4
> and 8 bytes atomically. (LDL_L, LDQ_L, STL_C, STQ_C).
> 
> The Byte-Word extension in EV56 doesn't add new atomics, so in fact no
> Alphas can address < 4 bytes atomically.
> 

Emulated with aligned 4 byte atomics, and masking.  The same is true for arm,
ppc, mips which, depending on cpu, also lack < 4 byte atomics.


r~