[PATCH] x86 bitops.h commentary on instruction reordering
Back when we were discussing the need for a memory barrier in sync_page(), it came to me (thanks Andrea!) that the bit operations can be perfectly reordered on architectures other than x86. I think the commentary on i386 bitops.h is misleading, its worth to note that that these operations are not guaranteed not to be reordered on different architectures. clear_bit() already does that: * clear_bit() is atomic and may not be reordered. However, it does * not contain a memory barrier, so if it is used for locking purposes, * you should call smp_mb__before_clear_bit() and/or smp_mb__after_clear_bit() * in order to ensure changes are visible on other processors. Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Showing
Please register or sign in to comment