Re: [PATCH 2/2] arm64: bpf: add BPF XADD instruction

Peter Zijlstra
2015-11-11T12:58:13Z

On Wed, Nov 11, 2015 at 12:38:31PM +0000, Will Deacon wrote:
> > Hmm, gcc doesn't have an eBPF compiler backend, so this won't work on
> > gcc at all. The eBPF backend in LLVM recognizes the __sync_fetch_and_add()
> > keyword and maps that to a BPF_XADD version (BPF_W or BPF_DW). In the
> > interpreter (__bpf_prog_run()), as Eric mentioned, this maps to atomic_add()
> > and atomic64_add(), respectively. So the struct bpf_insn prog[] you saw
> > from sock_example.c can be regarded as one possible equivalent program
> > section output from the compiler.
>
> Ok, so if I understand you correctly, then __sync_fetch_and_add() has
> different semantics depending on the backend target. That seems counter
> to the LLVM atomics Documentation:
>
> http://llvm.org/docs/Atomics.html
>
> which specifically calls out the __sync_* primitives as being
> sequentially-consistent and requiring barriers on ARM (which isn't the
> case for atomic[64]_add in the kernel).
>
> If we re-use the __sync_* naming scheme in the source language, I don't
> think we can overlay our own semantics in the backend. The
> __sync_fetch_and_add primitive is also expected to return the old value,
> which doesn't appear to be the case for BPF_XADD.

Yikes. That's double fail. Please don't do this.

If you use the __sync stuff (and I agree with Will, you should not) it
really _SHOULD_ be sequentially consistent, which means full barriers
all over the place.

And if you name something XADD (exchange and add, or fetch-add) then it
had better return the previous value.

atomic*_add() does neither.