Re: [ 06/44] ARM: 7467/1: mutex: use generic xchg-basedimplementation for ARMv6+

From: Ben Hutchings
Date: Wed Aug 15 2012 - 10:02:46 EST


On Mon, 2012-08-13 at 15:02 -0700, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
> From: Greg KH <gregkh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>
> 3.0-stable review patch. If anyone has any objections, please let me know.
>
> ------------------
>
> From: Will Deacon <will.deacon@xxxxxxx>
>
> commit a76d7bd96d65fa5119adba97e1b58d95f2e78829 upstream.
>
> The open-coded mutex implementation for ARMv6+ cores suffers from a
> severe lack of barriers, so in the uncontended case we don't actually
> protect any accesses performed during the critical section.
>
> Furthermore, the code is largely a duplication of the ARMv6+ atomic_dec
> code but optimised to remove a branch instruction, as the mutex fastpath
> was previously inlined. Now that this is executed out-of-line, we can
> reuse the atomic access code for the locking (in fact, we use the xchg
> code as this produces shorter critical sections).
>
> This patch uses the generic xchg based implementation for mutexes on
> ARMv6+, which introduces barriers to the lock/unlock operations and also
> has the benefit of removing a fair amount of inline assembly code.
[...]

This should be deferred, same as in 3.4.y and 3.5.y.

Ben.

--
Ben Hutchings
I say we take off; nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

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