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authorNick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>2007-10-18 03:06:39 -0700
committerLinus Torvalds <torvalds@woody.linux-foundation.org>2007-10-18 14:37:29 -0700
commit26333576fd0d0b52f6e4025c5aded97e188bdd44 (patch)
treea9c1f9518d940a8ef10453871f2899ca18d46efa /Documentation/memory-barriers.txt
parent38048983e14c0fb6324175fbaf2be1baa842f5ee (diff)
bitops: introduce lock ops
Introduce test_and_set_bit_lock / clear_bit_unlock bitops with lock semantics. Convert all architectures to use the generic implementation. Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de> Acked-By: David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com> Cc: Richard Henderson <rth@twiddle.net> Cc: Ivan Kokshaysky <ink@jurassic.park.msu.ru> Cc: Russell King <rmk@arm.linux.org.uk> Cc: Haavard Skinnemoen <hskinnemoen@atmel.com> Cc: Bryan Wu <bryan.wu@analog.com> Cc: Mikael Starvik <starvik@axis.com> Cc: David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com> Cc: Yoshinori Sato <ysato@users.sourceforge.jp> Cc: "Luck, Tony" <tony.luck@intel.com> Cc: Hirokazu Takata <takata@linux-m32r.org> Cc: Geert Uytterhoeven <geert@linux-m68k.org> Cc: Roman Zippel <zippel@linux-m68k.org> Cc: Greg Ungerer <gerg@uclinux.org> Cc: Ralf Baechle <ralf@linux-mips.org> Cc: Kyle McMartin <kyle@mcmartin.ca> Cc: Matthew Wilcox <willy@debian.org> Cc: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org> Cc: Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org> Cc: Heiko Carstens <heiko.carstens@de.ibm.com> Cc: Martin Schwidefsky <schwidefsky@de.ibm.com> Cc: Paul Mundt <lethal@linux-sh.org> Cc: Kazumoto Kojima <kkojima@rr.iij4u.or.jp> Cc: Richard Curnow <rc@rc0.org.uk> Cc: William Lee Irwin III <wli@holomorphy.com> Cc: "David S. Miller" <davem@davemloft.net> Cc: Jeff Dike <jdike@addtoit.com> Cc: Paolo 'Blaisorblade' Giarrusso <blaisorblade@yahoo.it> Cc: Miles Bader <uclinux-v850@lsi.nec.co.jp> Cc: Andi Kleen <ak@muc.de> Cc: Chris Zankel <chris@zankel.net> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Diffstat (limited to 'Documentation/memory-barriers.txt')
-rw-r--r--Documentation/memory-barriers.txt14
1 files changed, 12 insertions, 2 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/memory-barriers.txt b/Documentation/memory-barriers.txt
index 650657c5473..4e17beba237 100644
--- a/Documentation/memory-barriers.txt
+++ b/Documentation/memory-barriers.txt
@@ -1479,7 +1479,8 @@ kernel.
Any atomic operation that modifies some state in memory and returns information
about the state (old or new) implies an SMP-conditional general memory barrier
-(smp_mb()) on each side of the actual operation. These include:
+(smp_mb()) on each side of the actual operation (with the exception of
+explicit lock operations, described later). These include:
xchg();
cmpxchg();
@@ -1536,10 +1537,19 @@ If they're used for constructing a lock of some description, then they probably
do need memory barriers as a lock primitive generally has to do things in a
specific order.
-
Basically, each usage case has to be carefully considered as to whether memory
barriers are needed or not.
+The following operations are special locking primitives:
+
+ test_and_set_bit_lock();
+ clear_bit_unlock();
+ __clear_bit_unlock();
+
+These implement LOCK-class and UNLOCK-class operations. These should be used in
+preference to other operations when implementing locking primitives, because
+their implementations can be optimised on many architectures.
+
[!] Note that special memory barrier primitives are available for these
situations because on some CPUs the atomic instructions used imply full memory
barriers, and so barrier instructions are superfluous in conjunction with them,