On Thu, Aug 16, 2007 at 11:54:44AM +0200, Stefan Richter wrote:

One example was discussed here earlier:  The for (;;) loop in
nodemgr_host_thread.  There an msleep_interruptible implicitly acted as
barrier (at the moment because it's in a different translation unit; if
it were the same, then because it hopefully has own barriers).  So that
happens to work, although such an implicit barrier is bad style:  Better
enforce the desired behaviour (== guaranteed load operation) *explicitly*.

Hmm, it's not bad style at all.  Let's assume that everything
is in the same scope.  Such a loop must either call a function
that busy-waits, which should always have a cpu_relax or
something equivalent, or it'll call a function that schedules
away which immediately invalidates any values the compiler might
have cached for the atomic_read.

Cheers,
-- 
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