Re: [PATCH] block: switch to atomic_t for request references

Linus Torvalds
2021-12-08T18:50:31Z

On Wed, Dec 8, 2021 at 10:44 AM Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org> wrote:
>
> From testing xadd had different flags from add; I've not yet looked at
> the SDM to see what it said on the matter.

That should not be the case. Just checked, and it just says

"The CF, PF, AF, SF, ZF, and OF flags are set according to the
result of the addition, which is stored in the destination operand"

which shows that I was confused about 'xadd' - I thought it returned
the old value in the register ("fetch_add"). It doesn't. It returns
the new one ("add_fetch"). And then 'fetch_add' ends up undoing it by
doing a sub or whatever.

So the actual returned value and the flags should match on x86.

Other architectures have the "return old value" model, which does mean
that my "different architectures can have different preferences for
which one to test" argument was right, even if I got xadd wrong.

Linus