Re: [PATCH v2 0/4] riscv: Add Zalasr ISA extension support

[Andrea Parri <parri.andrea@gmail.com>]

[merging replies]

> > I prefer option c) at first, it has fewer modification and influence.
> Another reason is that store-release-to-load-acquire would give out a
> FENCE rw, rw according to RVWMO PPO 7th rule instead of FENCE.TSO, which
> is stricter than the Linux requirement you've mentioned.

I mean, if "fewer modification" and "not-a-full-fence" were the only
arguments, we would probably just stick with the current scheme (b),
right?  What other arguments are available?  Don't get me wrong: no a
priori objection from my end; I was really just wondering about the
various interests/rationales in the RISC-V kernel community.  (It may
surprise you, but some communities did consider that "UNLOCK+LOCK is
not a full memory barrier" a disadvantage, because briefly "locking
should provide strong ordering guarantees and be easy to reason about";
in fact, not just "locking" if we consider x86 or arm64...)


> > asm volatile(ALTERNATIVE("fence rw, w;\t\nsb %0, 0(%1)\t\n",	\
> > -			  SB_RL(%0, %1) "\t\nnop\t\n",		\
> > +			  SB_RL(%0, %1) "\t\n fence.tso;\t\n",	\
> > 			  0, RISCV_ISA_EXT_ZALASR, 1)		\
> > 			  : : "r" (v), "r" (p) : "memory");	\

nit: Why placing the fence after the store?  I imagine that FENCE.TSO
could precede the store, this way, the store would actually not need
to have that .RL annotation.  More importantly,

That for (part of) smp_store_release().  Let me stress that my option
(c) was meant to include similar changes for _every releases (that is,
cmpxchg_release(), atomic_inc_return_release(), and many other), even
if most of such releases do not currently create "problematic pairs"
with a corresponding acquire: the concern is that future changes in the
RISC-V atomics implementation or in generic locking code will introduce
pairs of the form FENCE RW,W + .AQ or .RL + FENCE R,RW without anyone
noticing...  In other words, I was suggesting that RISC-V _continues
to meet the ordering property under discussion "by design" rather than
"by Andrea or whoever's code auditing/review" (assuming it's feasible,
i.e. that it doesn't clash with other people's arguments?); options (a)
and (b) were also "designed" following this same criterion.

  Andrea