On Thursday, July 28, 2016 3:18:26 PM CEST LABBE Corentin wrote:

I will reworked locking and it seems that no locking is necessary.
I have added the following comment about the locking strategy:

/* Locking strategy:
 * RX queue does not need any lock since only sun8i_emac_poll() access it.
 * (All other RX modifiers (ringparam/ndo_stop) disable NAPI and so sun8i_emac_poll())
 * TX queue is handled by sun8i_emac_xmit(), sun8i_emac_complete_xmit() and sun8i_emac_tx_timeout()
 * (All other RX modifiers (ringparam/ndo_stop) disable NAPI and stop queue)
 *
 * sun8i_emac_xmit() could fire only once (netif_tx_lock)
 * sun8i_emac_complete_xmit() could fire only once (called from NAPI)
 * sun8i_emac_tx_timeout() could fire only once (netif_tx_lock) and couldnt
 * race with sun8i_emac_xmit (due to netif_tx_lock) and with sun8i_emac_complete_xmit which disable NAPI.
 *
 * So only sun8i_emac_xmit and sun8i_emac_complete_xmit could fire at the same time.
 * But they never could modify the same descriptors:
 * - sun8i_emac_complete_xmit() will modify only descriptors with empty status
 * - sun8i_emac_xmit() will modify only descriptors set to DCLEAN
 * Proper memory barriers ensure that descriptor set to DCLEAN could not be
 * modified latter by sun8i_emac_complete_xmit().
 * */

Sounds good, the comment is certainly very helpful here.

	Arnd