Re: MMIO and gcc re-ordering issue

From: Chris Friesen
Date: Tue May 27 2008 - 17:24:20 EST


Roland Dreier wrote:

Writes are posted yes, but not reordered arbitrarily. If I have code like:

spin_lock(&mmio_lock);
writel(val1, reg1);
writel(val2, reg2);
spin_unlock(&mmio_lock);

then I have a reasonable expectation that if two CPUs run this at the
same time, their writes to reg1/reg2 won't be interleaved with each
other (because the whole section is inside a spinlock). And Altix
violates that expectation.

Does that necessarily follow?

If you've got a large system with multiple pci bridges, could you end up with posted writes coming from different cpus taking a different amount of time to propagate to a device and thus colliding?

Chris
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