Re: MMIO and gcc re-ordering issue

Paul Mackerras
2008-06-11T04:19:03Z

Nick Piggin writes:

> OK, I'm sitll not quite sure where this has ended up. I guess you are happy
> with x86 semantics as they are now. That is, all IO accesses are strongly
> ordered WRT one another and WRT cacheable memory (which includes keeping
> them within spinlocks),

My understanding was that on x86, loads could pass stores in general,
i.e. a later load could be performed before an earlier store. I guess
that can't be true for uncached loads, but could a cacheable load be
performed before an earlier uncached store?

> - as strong as x86. guaranteed not to break drivers that work on x86,
> but slower on some archs. To me, this is most pleasing. It is much
> much easier to notice something is going a little slower and to work
> out how to use weaker ordering there, than it is to debug some
> once-in-a-bluemoon breakage caused by just the right architecture,
> driver, etc. It totally frees up the driver writer from thinking
> about barriers, provided they get the locking right.

I just wish we had even one actual example of things going wrong with
the current rules we have on powerpc to motivate changing to this
model.

> Now that doesn't leave waker ordering architectures lumped with "slow old
> x86 semantics". Think of it as giving them the benefit of sharing x86
> development and testing :) We can then formalise the relaxed __ accessors
> to be more complete (ie. +/- byteswapping).

That leaves a gulf between the extremely strongly ordered writel
etc. and the extremely weakly ordered __writel etc. The current
powerpc scheme is fine for a lot of drivers but your proposal would
leave us no way to deliver it to them.

Paul.