On Fri, Jun 04, 2021 at 02:44:22PM +0100, Will Deacon wrote:

On Fri, Jun 04, 2021 at 01:31:48PM +0200, Peter Zijlstra wrote:

quoted

On Fri, Jun 04, 2021 at 11:44:00AM +0100, Will Deacon wrote:

quoted

On Fri, Jun 04, 2021 at 12:12:07PM +0200, Peter Zijlstra wrote:

quoted

quoted

Usage of volatile_if requires the @cond to be headed by a volatile load
(READ_ONCE() / atomic_read() etc..) such that the compiler is forced to
emit the load and the branch emitted will have the required
data-dependency. Furthermore, volatile_if() is a compiler barrier, which
should prohibit the compiler from lifting anything out of the selection
statement.

When building with LTO on arm64, we already upgrade READ_ONCE() to an RCpc
acquire. In this case, it would be really good to avoid having the dummy
conditional branch somehow, but I can't see a good way to achieve that.

#ifdef CONFIG_LTO
/* Because __READ_ONCE() is load-acquire */
#define volatile_cond(cond)	(cond)
#else
....
#endif

Doesn't work? Bit naf, but I'm thinking it ought to do.

The problem is with relaxed atomic RMWs; we don't upgrade those to acquire
atm as they're written in asm, but we'd need volatile_cond() to work with
them. It's a shame, because we only have RCsc RMWs on arm64, so it would
be a bit more expensive.

Urgh, I see. Compiler can't really help in that case either I'm afraid.
They'll never want to modify loads that originate in an asm(). They'll
say to use the C11 _Atomic crud.