From 5726ce06ad6bcd8dd75a204d1465c99a2f897d3a Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: "Paul E. McKenney" Date: Tue, 13 May 2014 10:14:51 -0700 Subject: documentation: Clarify wake-up/memory-barrier relationship This commit adds an example demonstrating that if a wake_up() doesn't actually wake something up, no memory ordering is provided. Reported-by: Peter Zijlstra Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney Reviewed-by: Josh Triplett Reviewed-by: Lai Jiangshan Acked-by: Peter Zijlstra --- Documentation/memory-barriers.txt | 15 +++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 15 insertions(+) (limited to 'Documentation/memory-barriers.txt') diff --git a/Documentation/memory-barriers.txt b/Documentation/memory-barriers.txt index f1dc4a215593..a6ca533a73fc 100644 --- a/Documentation/memory-barriers.txt +++ b/Documentation/memory-barriers.txt @@ -1893,6 +1893,21 @@ between the STORE to indicate the event and the STORE to set TASK_RUNNING: STORE current->state LOAD event_indicated +To repeat, this write memory barrier is present if and only if something +is actually awakened. To see this, consider the following sequence of +events, where X and Y are both initially zero: + + CPU 1 CPU 2 + =============================== =============================== + X = 1; STORE event_indicated + smp_mb(); wake_up(); + Y = 1; wait_event(wq, Y == 1); + wake_up(); load from Y sees 1, no memory barrier + load from X might see 0 + +In contrast, if a wakeup does occur, CPU 2's load from X would be guaranteed +to see 1. + The available waker functions include: complete(); -- cgit