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

["Michael S. Tsirkin" <mst@redhat.com>]

On Tue, May 22, 2012 at 08:56:12AM +1000, Benjamin Herrenschmidt wrote:
> On Tue, 2012-05-22 at 01:22 +0300, Michael S. Tsirkin wrote:
> > > Again, from which originator ? From a given initiator, nothing
> > bypasses
> > > anything, so the right thing to do here is a full mb(). However, I
> > > suspect what you are talking about here is read -responses- not
> > > bypassing writes in the direction of the response (ie, the
> > "flushing"
> > > semantic of reads) which is a different matter.
> > 
> > No. My spec says:
> > A3, A4
> > A Posted Request must be able to pass Non-Posted Requests to avoid
> > deadlocks.
> 
> Right, a read + write can become write + read at the target, I forgot
> about that, or you can deadlock due to the flush semantics, but a write
> + read must remain in order or am I missing something ?

Exactly.

> And write + read afaik is typically the one that x86 can re-order
> without a barrier isn't it ?

AFAIK without a barrier, x86 can reorder them however you initiate them.

-- 
MST