Satyam Sharma wrote:

On Fri, 17 Aug 2007, Nick Piggin wrote:

quoted

quoted

Sure, now
that I learned of these properties I can start to audit code and insert
barriers where I believe they are needed, but this simply means that
almost all occurrences of atomic_read will get barriers (unless there
already are implicit but more or less obvious barriers like msleep).

You might find that these places that appear to need barriers are
buggy for other reasons anyway. Can you point to some in-tree code
we can have a look at?

Such code was mentioned elsewhere (query nodemgr_host_thread in cscope)
that managed to escape the requirement for a barrier only because of
some completely un-obvious compilation-unit-scope thing. But I find such
an non-explicit barrier quite bad taste. Stefan, do consider plunking an
explicit call to barrier() there.

It is very obvious. msleep calls schedule() (ie. sleeps), which is
always a barrier.

The "unobvious" thing is that you wanted to know how the compiler knows
a function is a barrier -- answer is that if it does not *know* it is not
a barrier, it must assume it is a barrier. If the whole msleep call chain
including the scheduler were defined static in the current compilation
unit, then it would still be a barrier because it would actually be able
to see the barriers in schedule(void), if nothing else.