Documentation/locking/atomic: Add documents for new atomic_t APIs

Since we've vastly expanded the atomic_t interface in recent years the
existing documentation is woefully out of date and people seem to get
confused a bit.

Start a new document to hopefully better explain the current state of
affairs.

The old atomic_ops.txt also covers bitmaps and a few more details so
this is not a full replacement and we'll therefore keep that document
around until such a time that we've managed to write more text to cover
its entire.

Also please, ReST people, go away.

Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra (Intel) <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: Boqun Feng <boqun.feng@gmail.com>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Paul McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: Randy Dunlap <rdunlap@infradead.org>
Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Cc: Will Deacon <will.deacon@arm.com>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
This commit is contained in:
Peter Zijlstra
2017-06-12 14:50:27 +02:00
committed by Ingo Molnar
parent 450f9689f2
commit 706eeb3e9c
3 changed files with 273 additions and 89 deletions

View File

@@ -498,11 +498,11 @@ And a couple of implicit varieties:
This means that ACQUIRE acts as a minimal "acquire" operation and
RELEASE acts as a minimal "release" operation.
A subset of the atomic operations described in core-api/atomic_ops.rst have
ACQUIRE and RELEASE variants in addition to fully-ordered and relaxed (no
barrier semantics) definitions. For compound atomics performing both a load
and a store, ACQUIRE semantics apply only to the load and RELEASE semantics
apply only to the store portion of the operation.
A subset of the atomic operations described in atomic_t.txt have ACQUIRE and
RELEASE variants in addition to fully-ordered and relaxed (no barrier
semantics) definitions. For compound atomics performing both a load and a
store, ACQUIRE semantics apply only to the load and RELEASE semantics apply
only to the store portion of the operation.
Memory barriers are only required where there's a possibility of interaction
between two CPUs or between a CPU and a device. If it can be guaranteed that
@@ -1876,8 +1876,7 @@ There are some more advanced barrier functions:
This makes sure that the death mark on the object is perceived to be set
*before* the reference counter is decremented.
See Documentation/core-api/atomic_ops.rst for more information. See the
"Atomic operations" subsection for information on where to use these.
See Documentation/atomic_{t,bitops}.txt for more information.
(*) lockless_dereference();
@@ -2503,88 +2502,7 @@ operations are noted specially as some of them imply full memory barriers and
some don't, but they're very heavily relied on as a group throughout the
kernel.
Any atomic operation that modifies some state in memory and returns information
about the state (old or new) implies an SMP-conditional general memory barrier
(smp_mb()) on each side of the actual operation (with the exception of
explicit lock operations, described later). These include:
xchg();
atomic_xchg(); atomic_long_xchg();
atomic_inc_return(); atomic_long_inc_return();
atomic_dec_return(); atomic_long_dec_return();
atomic_add_return(); atomic_long_add_return();
atomic_sub_return(); atomic_long_sub_return();
atomic_inc_and_test(); atomic_long_inc_and_test();
atomic_dec_and_test(); atomic_long_dec_and_test();
atomic_sub_and_test(); atomic_long_sub_and_test();
atomic_add_negative(); atomic_long_add_negative();
test_and_set_bit();
test_and_clear_bit();
test_and_change_bit();
/* when succeeds */
cmpxchg();
atomic_cmpxchg(); atomic_long_cmpxchg();
atomic_add_unless(); atomic_long_add_unless();
These are used for such things as implementing ACQUIRE-class and RELEASE-class
operations and adjusting reference counters towards object destruction, and as
such the implicit memory barrier effects are necessary.
The following operations are potential problems as they do _not_ imply memory
barriers, but might be used for implementing such things as RELEASE-class
operations:
atomic_set();
set_bit();
clear_bit();
change_bit();
With these the appropriate explicit memory barrier should be used if necessary
(smp_mb__before_atomic() for instance).
The following also do _not_ imply memory barriers, and so may require explicit
memory barriers under some circumstances (smp_mb__before_atomic() for
instance):
atomic_add();
atomic_sub();
atomic_inc();
atomic_dec();
If they're used for statistics generation, then they probably don't need memory
barriers, unless there's a coupling between statistical data.
If they're used for reference counting on an object to control its lifetime,
they probably don't need memory barriers because either the reference count
will be adjusted inside a locked section, or the caller will already hold
sufficient references to make the lock, and thus a memory barrier unnecessary.
If they're used for constructing a lock of some description, then they probably
do need memory barriers as a lock primitive generally has to do things in a
specific order.
Basically, each usage case has to be carefully considered as to whether memory
barriers are needed or not.
The following operations are special locking primitives:
test_and_set_bit_lock();
clear_bit_unlock();
__clear_bit_unlock();
These implement ACQUIRE-class and RELEASE-class operations. These should be
used in preference to other operations when implementing locking primitives,
because their implementations can be optimised on many architectures.
[!] Note that special memory barrier primitives are available for these
situations because on some CPUs the atomic instructions used imply full memory
barriers, and so barrier instructions are superfluous in conjunction with them,
and in such cases the special barrier primitives will be no-ops.
See Documentation/core-api/atomic_ops.rst for more information.
See Documentation/atomic_t.txt for more information.
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