Re: [PATCH v2] introduce atomic_pointer to fix a race condition in cancelable mcs spinlocks

Peter Zijlstra
2014-06-02T16:30:52Z

On Mon, Jun 02, 2014 at 06:25:25PM +0200, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> I'm almost inclined to just exclude parisc from using opt spinning.
>
> That said, this patch still doesn't address the far more interesting
> problem of actually finding these issues for these few weird archs.

So why do these archs provide xchg() and cmpxchg() at all? Wouldn't it
be much simpler if archs that cannot sanely do this, not provide these
primitives at all?