On Thu, Feb 13, 2014 at 08:43:01PM -0800, Torvald Riegel wrote:

On Thu, 2014-02-13 at 18:01 -0800, Paul E. McKenney wrote:

[ . . . ]

quoted

Another option would be to flag the conditional expression, prohibiting
the compiler from optimizing out any conditional branches.  Perhaps
something like this:

	r1 = atomic_load(x, memory_order_control);
	if (control_dependency(r1))
		atomic_store(y, memory_order_relaxed);

That's the one I had in mind and talked to you about earlier today.  My
gut feeling is that this is preferably over the other because it "marks"
the if-statement, so the compiler knows exactly which branches matter.
I'm not sure one would need the other memory order for that, if indeed
all you want is relaxed -> branch -> relaxed.  But maybe there are
corner cases (see the weaker-than-relaxed discussion in SG1 today).

Linus, Peter, any objections to marking places where we are relying on
ordering from control dependencies against later stores?  This approach
seems to me to have significant documentation benefits.

							Thanx, Paul