Linus Torvalds wrote:
>
> On Fri, 8 Feb 2002, Ingo Molnar wrote:
> >
> > and regarding the reintroduction of BKL, *please* do not just use a global
> > locks around such pieces of code, lock bouncing sucks on SMP, even if
> > there is no overhead.
>
> I'd suggest not having a lock at all, but instead add two functions: one
> to read a 64-bit value atomically, the other to write it atomically (and
> they'd be atomic only wrt each other, no memory barriers etc implied).
>
> On 64-bit architectures that's just a direct dereference, and even on x86
> it's just a "cmpxchg8b".
Are there architectures out there that absolutely must implement this
with a spinlock? Your suggested API of functions to read/write 64-bit
values atomically would work for such a case, but still I am just
curious.
Jeff
-- Jeff Garzik | "I went through my candy like hot oatmeal Building 1024 | through an internally-buttered weasel." MandrakeSoft | - goats.com - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Feb 15 2002 - 21:00:21 EST