On Wed, Aug 15, 2007 at 06:41:40PM -0700, Christoph Lameter wrote:

On Wed, 15 Aug 2007, Paul E. McKenney wrote:

quoted

Understood.  My point is not that the impact is precisely zero, but
rather that the impact on optimization is much less hurtful than the
problems that could arise otherwise, particularly as compilers become
more aggressive in their optimizations.

The problems arise because barriers are not used as required. Volatile 
has wishy washy semantics and somehow marries memory barriers with data 
access. It is clearer to separate the two. Conceptual cleanness usually 
translates into better code. If one really wants the volatile then lets 
make it explicit and use

	atomic_read_volatile()

There are indeed architectures where you can cause gcc to emit memory
barriers in response to volatile.  I am assuming that we are -not-
making gcc do this.  Given this, then volatiles and memory barrier
instructions are orthogonal -- one controls the compiler, the other
controls the CPU.

						Thanx, Paul