Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/24] make atomic_read() behave consistently across all architectures

From: Chris Snook <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 16 Aug 2007 15:55:17 -0400

Ilpo Järvinen wrote:
> On Thu, 16 Aug 2007, Herbert Xu wrote:
> 
>> We've been through that already.  If it's a busy-wait it
>> should use cpu_relax. 
> 
> I looked around a bit by using some command lines and ended up wondering 
> if these are equal to busy-wait case (and should be fixed) or not:
> 
> ./drivers/telephony/ixj.c
> 6674:   while (atomic_read(&j->DSPWrite) > 0)
> 6675-           atomic_dec(&j->DSPWrite);
> 
> ...besides that, there are couple of more similar cases in the same file 
> (with braces)...

atomic_dec() already has volatile behavior everywhere, so this is 
semantically okay, but this code (and any like it) should be calling 
cpu_relax() each iteration through the loop, unless there's a compelling 
reason not to.  I'll allow that for some hardware drivers (possibly this 
one) such a compelling reason may exist, but hardware-independent core 
subsystems probably have no excuse.

If the maintainer of this code doesn't see a compelling reason to add 
cpu_relax() in this loop, then it should be patched.

	-- Chris