Re: [patch] mm: fix anon_vma races

[Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>]

On Sat, 18 Oct 2008, Paul Mackerras wrote:
> 
> Not sure what you mean by causal consistency, but I assume it's the
> same as saying that barriers give cumulative ordering, as described on
> page 413 of the Power Architecture V2.05 document at:

I'm pretty sure that everybody but alpha is ok.

And alpha needs the smp_read_barrier_depends() not because it doesn't 
really support causality, but because each CPU internally doesn't 
guarantee that they handle the cache invalidates in-order without a 
barrier. 

So without the smp_read_barrier_depends(), alpha will actually have the 
proper causal relationships (cachelines will move to exclusive state on 
CPU0 in the right order and others will see the causality), but because 
CPU2 may see the stale data from not even having invalidated the 
"anon_vma.initialized" because the cache invalidation queue hadn't been 
flushed in order.

Alpha is insane. And the odd man out.

			Linus

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