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

Will Deacon
2015-11-11T10:24:09Z

On Wed, Nov 11, 2015 at 09:49:48AM +0100, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> On Tuesday 10 November 2015 18:52:45 Z Lim wrote:
> > On Tue, Nov 10, 2015 at 4:42 PM, Alexei Starovoitov
> > <alexei.starovoitov@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > On Tue, Nov 10, 2015 at 04:26:02PM -0800, Shi, Yang wrote:
> > >> On 11/10/2015 4:08 PM, Eric Dumazet wrote:
> > >> >On Tue, 2015-11-10 at 14:41 -0800, Yang Shi wrote:
> > >> >>aarch64 doesn't have native support for XADD instruction, implement it by
> > >> >>the below instruction sequence:
> >
> > aarch64 supports atomic add in ARMv8.1.
> > For ARMv8(.0), please consider using LDXR/STXR sequence.
>
> Is it worth optimizing for the 8.1 case? It would add a bit of complexity
> to make the code depend on the CPU feature, but it's certainly doable.

What's the atomicity required for? Put another way, what are we racing
with (I thought bpf was single-threaded)? Do we need to worry about
memory barriers?

Apologies if these are stupid questions, but all I could find was
samples/bpf/sock_example.c and it didn't help much :(

Will