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-rw-r--r--Documentation/memory-barriers.txt11
1 files changed, 11 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/memory-barriers.txt b/Documentation/memory-barriers.txt
index d336e4d42029..8e7cf9ad3db1 100644
--- a/Documentation/memory-barriers.txt
+++ b/Documentation/memory-barriers.txt
@@ -1710,6 +1710,17 @@ There are some more advanced barrier functions:
operations" subsection for information on where to use these.
+ (*) lockless_dereference();
+ This can be thought of as a pointer-fetch wrapper around the
+ smp_read_barrier_depends() data-dependency barrier.
+
+ This is also similar to rcu_dereference(), but in cases where
+ object lifetime is handled by some mechanism other than RCU, for
+ example, when the objects removed only when the system goes down.
+ In addition, lockless_dereference() is used in some data structures
+ that can be used both with and without RCU.
+
+
(*) dma_wmb();
(*) dma_rmb();