On Fri, 17 Aug 2007, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Sat, 18 Aug 2007, Satyam Sharma wrote: > > > > No code does (or would do, or should do): > > > > x.counter++; > > > > on an "atomic_t x;" anyway. > > That's just an example of a general problem. > > No, you don't use "x.counter++". But you *do* use > > if (atomic_read(&x) <= 1) > > and loading into a register is stupid and pointless, when you could just > do it as a regular memory-operand to the cmp instruction. True, but that makes this a bad/poor code generation issue with the compiler, not something that affects the _correctness_ of atomic ops if "volatile" is used for that counter object (as was suggested), because we'd always use the atomic_inc() etc primitives to do increments, which are always (should be!) implemented to be atomic. > And as far as the compiler is concerned, the problem is the 100% same: > combining operations with the volatile memop. > > The fact is, a compiler that thinks that > > movl mem,reg > cmpl $val,reg > > is any better than > > cmpl $val,mem > > is just not a very good compiler. Absolutely, this is definitely a bug report worth opening with gcc. And what you've said to explain this previously sounds definitely correct -- seeing "volatile" for any access does appear to just scare the hell out of gcc and makes it generate such (poor) code. Satyam - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
