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

["Paul E. McKenney" <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>]

On Mon, Jun 02, 2014 at 10:09:35AM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 2, 2014 at 9:25 AM, Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org> wrote:
> >
> > And I can't say I'm a particular fan of these ops either, as alternative
> > I'm almost inclined to just exclude parisc from using opt spinning.
> 
> Please do.
> 
> There is no way in hell that we should introduce a magic new
> atomic_pointer thing for parisc. And the idea somebody had to change
> ACCESS_ONCE() for PA-RISC (I'm not going to go back to find who to
> blame) is just horribly wrong too, since it's not even necessary for
> any normal use: the special "load-and-store-zero" instruction isn't
> actually used for "real" data, it's used only for the special
> spinlocks afaik, so doing it for all ACCESS_ONCE() users would be
> wrong even on PA-RISC. For any normal data, the usual "just load the
> value, making sure the compiler doesn't reload it" is perfectly fine -
> even on PA-RISC.

Guilty to charges as read on suggesting PA-RISC-specific ACCESS_ONCE().  ;-)

							Thanx, Paul

> Now, if PA-RISC was a major architecture, we'd have to figure this
> out. But as it is, PA-RISC is just about the shittiest RISC ever
> invented (with original sparc being a strong contender), and let's
> face it, nobody really uses it.  It's a "fun project", but it is not
> something that we should use to mess up either ACCESS_ONCE() or the
> MCS locks.
> 
> Just make PA-RISC use its own locks, not any of the new fancy ones.
> 
>               Linus
>