Re: [PATCH] [POWERPC] Improve (in|out)_beXX() asm code

[Trent Piepho]

On Tue, 20 May 2008, Benjamin Herrenschmidt wrote:
> On Tue, 2008-05-20 at 16:38 -0500, Scott Wood wrote:
> > It looks like we rely on -fno-strict-aliasing to prevent reordering
> > ordinary memory accesses (such as to DMA descriptors) past the I/O
> > access.  It won't prevent reordering of memory reads around an I/O
> > read,
> > though, which could be a problem if the I/O read result determines
> > the
> > validity of the DMA buffer.  IMHO, a memory clobber would be better.
>
> We probably want a full "memory" clobber then...

As far as I could tell, no other arch has a full memory clobber.  I can see
the argument for changing the Linux model to be stricter and less efficient,
but easier to program for.  Not that I entirely agree with it.

But I don't see a good reason for why powerpc should be different than
everything else.
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