• David Howells's avatar
    [PATCH] Fix memory barrier docs wrt atomic ops · dbc8700e
    David Howells authored
    Fix the memory barrier documentation to attempt to describe atomic ops
    correctly.
    
    atomic_t ops that return a value _do_ imply smp_mb() either side, and so
    don't actually require smp_mb__*_atomic_*() special barriers.
    
    Also explains why special barriers exist in addition to normal barriers.
    
    Further fix the memory barrier documents to portray bitwise operation
    memory barrier effects correctly following Nick Piggin's comments.
    
    It makes the point that any atomic op that both modifies some state in
    memory and returns information on that state implies memory barriers on
    both sides.
    Signed-off-by: default avatarDavid Howells <dhowells@redhat.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
    dbc8700e
memory-barriers.txt 66 KB