Re: Q: schedule() and implied barriers on arm64

[Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>]

On Mon, Oct 19, 2015 at 04:21:08PM +0100, Catalin Marinas wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 19, 2015 at 09:06:05AM +0200, Ingo Molnar wrote:
> > * Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org> wrote:
> > 
> > > In any case, its all moot now, since Paul no longer requires schedule() to imply 
> > > a full barrier.
> > >
> > > [...]
> > 
> > Nevertheless from a least-surprise POV it might be worth guaranteeing it, because 
> > I bet there's tons of code that assumes that schedule() is a heavy operation and 
> > it's such an easy mistake to make. Since we are so close to having that guarantee, 
> > we might as well codify it?
> 
> FWIW, the arm64 __switch_to() has a heavy barrier (DSB) but the reason
> for this was to cope with potentially interrupted cache or TLB
> maintenance (which require a DSB on the same CPU) and thread migration
> to another CPU.

Right, but there's a path through schedule() that does not pass through
__switch_to(); when we pick the current task as the most eligible task
and next == prev.

In that case there really only is the wmb, a spin lock, an atomic op and
a spin unlock (and a whole bunch of 'normal' code of course).