Subject: Re: rcu_read_lock lost its compiler barrier

From: "Paul E. McKenney" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 6 Jun 2019 02:06:19 -0700

On Thu, Jun 06, 2019 at 02:14:38PM +0800, Herbert Xu wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 05, 2019 at 11:05:11PM -0700, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> >
> > In case you were wondering, the reason that I was giving you such
> > a hard time was that from what I could see, you were pushing for no
> > {READ,WRITE}_ONCE() at all.  ;-)
> 
> Hmm, that's exactly what it should be in net/ipv4/inet_fragment.c.
> We don't need the READ_ONCE/WRITE_ONCE (or volatile marking) at
> all.  Even if the compiler dices and slices the reads/writes of
> "a" into a thousand pieces, it should still work if the RCU
> primitives are worth their salt.

OK, so I take it that there is additional synchronization in there
somewhere that is not captured in your simplified example code?

Or is your point instead that given the initial value of "a" being
zero and the value stored to "a" being one, there is no way that
any possible load and store tearing (your slicing and dicing) could
possibly mess up the test of the value loaded from "a"?

> But I do concede that in the general RCU case you must have the
> READ_ONCE/WRITE_ONCE calls for rcu_dereference/rcu_assign_pointer.

OK, good that we are in agreement on this part, at least!  ;-)

							Thanx, Paul