From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Nick Piggin Subject: Re: [rfc] SLOB memory ordering issue Date: Thu, 16 Oct 2008 06:19:53 +1100 References: <200810160334.13082.nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au> <200810160535.51586.nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au> In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline Message-Id: <200810160619.53510.nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au> Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org Return-Path: To: Linus Torvalds Cc: Matt Mackall , Pekka Enberg , linux-mm@kvack.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org List-ID: On Thursday 16 October 2008 05:43, Linus Torvalds wrote: > On Thu, 16 Oct 2008, Nick Piggin wrote: > > Actually, there are surprisingly huge number of them. What I would be > > most comfortable doing, if I was making a kernel to run my life support > > system on an SMP powerpc box, would be to spend zero time on all the > > drivers and whacky things with ctors and just add smp_wmb() after them > > if they are not _totally_ obvious. > > WHY? I guess I wouldn't bother with your kernel. I was being hypothetical. Can you _prove_ no code has a bug due specifically to this issue? > THIS HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH CONSTRUCTORS! > > If the driver is using locking, there is no memory ordering issues > what-so-ever. > > And if the driver isn't using locking, IT IS BROKEN. Did you read the anon_vma example? It's broken if it assumes the objects coming out of its slab are always "stable". > It's that simple. Why do you keep bringing up non-issues? Why are you being antagonistic and assuming I'm wrong instead of considering you mistunderstand me, maybe I'm not a retard? I am bad at explaining myself, but I'll try once more. > What matters is not constructors. Never has been. Constructors are > actually very rare, it's much more common to do > > ptr = kmalloc(..) > .. initialize it by hand .. > > and why do you think constructors are somehow different? They're not. I think they might be interpreted or viewed by the caller as giving a "stable" object. It is rather more obvious to a caller that it has previous unordered stores if it is doing this ptr = kmalloc(..) .. initialize it by hand .. I haven't dealt much with constructors myself so I haven't really had to think about it. But I'm sure I could have missed it and been fooled. If you still don't agree, then fine; if I find a bug I'll send a patch. I don't want to keep arguing. > What matter is how you look things up on the other CPU's. If you don't use > locking, you use some lockless thing, and then you need to be careful > about memory ordering. > > And quite frankly, if you're a driver, and you're trying to do lockless > algorithms, you're just being crazy. You're going to have much worse bugs, > and again, whether you use constructors or pink elephants is going to be > totally irrelevant. > > So why do you bring up these totally pointless things? Why do you bring up > drivers? Why do you bring up constructors? Why, why, why? I'll try to keep them to myself in future. Thanks, Nick -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@kvack.org. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Don't email: email@kvack.org