Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH] Add a memory barrier to guest memory access functions

[Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org>]

On Mon, 2012-05-21 at 17:18 -0500, Anthony Liguori wrote:
> But this isn't what this series is about.
> 
> This series is only attempting to make sure that writes are ordered
> with respect 
> to other writes in main memory.

Actually, it applies to both reads and writes. They can't pass each
other either and that can be fairly important.

It's in fact the main contention point because if it was only writes we
could just use wmb and be done with it (that's a nop on x86).

Because we are trying to order everything (and specifically store
followed by a load), we need a full barrier which is more expensive on
x86.

Ben.

> It's based on the assumption that write ordering is well defined (and
> typically 
> strict) on most busses including PCI.  I have not confirmed this
> myself but I 
> trust that Ben has.
> 
> So the only problem trying to be solved here is to make sure that if a
> write A 
> is issued by the device model while it's on PCPU 0, if PCPU 1 does a
> write B to 
> another location, and then the device model runs on PCPU 2 and does a
> read of 
> both A and B, it will only see the new value of B if the it sees the
> new value of A.
> 
> Whether the driver on VCPU 0 (which may be on any PCPU) also sees the
> write 
> ordering is irrelevant.
> 
> If you want to avoid taking a barrier on every write, we can make use
> of map() 
> and issue explicit barriers (as virtio does).
> 
>