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authorWill Deacon <will.deacon@arm.com>2015-07-16 16:10:06 +0100
committerIngo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>2015-08-03 10:57:09 +0200
commited2de9f74ecbbf3063d29b2334e7b455d7f35189 (patch)
treeb72f333309835d9b23c695d2921c965627746c69 /Documentation/atomic_ops.txt
parent0b792bf519e68108d577fcec815ab50913787012 (diff)
locking/Documentation: Clarify failed cmpxchg() memory ordering semantics
A failed cmpxchg does not provide any memory ordering guarantees, a property that is used to optimise the cmpxchg implementations on Alpha, PowerPC and arm64. This patch updates atomic_ops.txt and memory-barriers.txt to reflect this. Signed-off-by: Will Deacon <will.deacon@arm.com> Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra (Intel) <peterz@infradead.org> Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Cc: Davidlohr Bueso <dave@stgolabs.net> Cc: Douglas Hatch <doug.hatch@hp.com> Cc: H. Peter Anvin <hpa@zytor.com> Cc: Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net> Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> Cc: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com> Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org> Cc: Scott J Norton <scott.norton@hp.com> Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de> Cc: Waiman Long <waiman.long@hp.com> Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20150716151006.GH26390@arm.com Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
Diffstat (limited to 'Documentation/atomic_ops.txt')
-rw-r--r--Documentation/atomic_ops.txt4
1 files changed, 3 insertions, 1 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/atomic_ops.txt b/Documentation/atomic_ops.txt
index dab6da3382d9..b19fc34efdb1 100644
--- a/Documentation/atomic_ops.txt
+++ b/Documentation/atomic_ops.txt
@@ -266,7 +266,9 @@ with the given old and new values. Like all atomic_xxx operations,
atomic_cmpxchg will only satisfy its atomicity semantics as long as all
other accesses of *v are performed through atomic_xxx operations.
-atomic_cmpxchg must provide explicit memory barriers around the operation.
+atomic_cmpxchg must provide explicit memory barriers around the operation,
+although if the comparison fails then no memory ordering guarantees are
+required.
The semantics for atomic_cmpxchg are the same as those defined for 'cas'
below.