Re: [RFC PATCH 0/3] MIPS: Chaos of barrier misuses

From: Maciej W. Rozycki
Date: Mon Feb 21 2022 - 11:38:20 EST


On Mon, 21 Feb 2022, Jiaxun Yang wrote:

> This series clears the chaos of barrier misuse.
> In prepration of light weight barrier series.

What problem are you trying to solve here?

The MIPS port currently implements the semantics documented in
Documentation/memory-barriers.txt, in particular the "KERNEL I/O BARRIER
EFFECTS" section, with extra I/O barriers borrowed from the PowerPC port
for consistency for platform use, due to the weakly ordered architectural
MMIO model (implementations are allowed to have a stronger model in place
of course, and you are free to optimise for them with the respective
configurations).

Stating that we have a "chaos of barrier misuse" doesn't say anything
really in my opinion and isn't particularly constructive either. This
area is very fragile and you need to understand all the consequences when
trying to make any changes here and show it with your submission, that is
properly describe and justify your changes so that people are convinced
your changes are correct and good to make.

Maciej