Re: [PATCH 2/3] rust: sync: generic memory barriers

Joel Fernandes
2026-04-03T21:33:34Z

On 4/2/2026 8:07 PM, Gary Guo wrote:
> On Thu Apr 2, 2026 at 10:49 PM BST, Joel Fernandes wrote:

[...]

>> See also in Documentation/memory-barriers.txt, ACQUIRE and RELEASE are defined as being
>> tied to specific memory operations.
>
> That's what we have today, hence the implementation upgrades them to full memory
> barriers. But ACQUIRE and RELEASE orderings doesn't *need* to be tied to
> specific memory operations and they can still make conceptual sense as barriers.
>
> C11 memory model defines Acquire and Release fences, and it looks to me it's
> relatively easy to add it to LKMM. I was playing with Herd7 and I think I've got
> it working, see the attached diff.
>
> Another thing that I'd like to note is that in all architectures that we have
> today except ARM and PARISC, the smp_load_acquire and smp_store_release are
> actually implemented as READ_ONCE + ACQUIRE barrier and RELEASE barrier +
> WRITE_ONCE. I'm planning to propose C API and corresponding memory model change
> too, but I want to gather some more concrete numbers (the performance benefit of
> having dma_mb_acquire/dma_mb_release compared to full dma_mb) before proposing so.
>
> Note that marked dma_load_acquire/dma_store_release (and their mandatory
> versions) don't make too much sense, as AFAIK no architectures have instructions
> for them so you're implementing these as fence instructions anyway.

Ah, so you're proposing new memory barrier types that don't exist anywhere
in the kernel yet. I thought you were just wrapping existing ones so it got
a bit confusing.

My suggestion: fix the nova-core issue in patch 3 using dma_mb() directly,
without the new barrier types. Adding a new standalone release/acquire
fence semantic to the kernel is something that will need broad consensus
from the LKMM maintainers IMO, independent of this series. It's a bigger
conversation that could delay your nova bug fix.

Once smp_mb_release() / smp_mb_acquire() (or the DMA equivalents) land
properly, updating nova to use them will be trivial. But the correctness of
the fix shouldn't depend on semantics that don't exist in the kernel yet,
even if they currently degrade to a full barrier.

That said, I find the idea genuinely interesting, and thanks for keeping me
in the loop. Standalone acquire/release fences that are formally modeled in
LKMM and A-cumulative is interesting as you showed in the herd7 code. You
would want to update Documentation/memory-barriers.txt too.

thanks,

--
Joel Fernandes