Re: [2*PATCH] alpha I/O access and mb()

From: Abramo Bagnara (abramo@alsa-project.org)
Date: Sat Dec 09 2000 - 06:32:32 EST


Gérard Roudier wrote:
>
>
> Based on that, let me claim that most of blind barriers inserted this way
> are useless (thus sob-optimal) and may band-aid useful barriers that are
> missing. The result is subtle bugs, hidden most of the time, that we will
> have to suffer for decades.
>
> The only way to do things right regarding ordering it to have device
> drivers _aware_ of such issues. Now, if we are happy with broken portable
> or platform-independant drivers that rely on broken hidden ordering
> alchemy rather than on correctness, then it is another story.

I see perfectly your point and this is the reason why we have
__raw_write[bwlq] in 2.4, but write[bwlq] expected semantic is to ensure
that write *happens* and are visible by other agents.

You can tell me that almost nobody uses __raw_write now and this is bad
and I agree with you, but sometime this is not a perfect world ;-)

-- 
Abramo Bagnara                       mailto:abramo@alsa-project.org

Opera Unica Phone: +39.546.656023 Via Emilia Interna, 140 48014 Castel Bolognese (RA) - Italy

ALSA project is http://www.alsa-project.org sponsored by SuSE Linux http://www.suse.com

It sounds good! - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/



This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Dec 15 2000 - 21:00:17 EST