Conditional atomic operations (e.g. cmpxchg()) only provide ordering
when the condition holds; when the condition does not hold, the location
is not modified and relaxed ordering is provided. Where ordering is
needed for failed conditional atomics, it is necessary to use
smp_mb__before_atomic() and/or smp_mb__after_atomic().
This is explained tersely in memory-barriers.txt, and is implied but not
explicitly stated in the kerneldoc comments for the conditional
operations. The lack of an explicit statement has lead to some off-list
queries about the ordering semantics of failing conditional operations,
so evidently this is confusing.
Update the kerneldoc comments to explicitly describe the lack of ordering
for failed conditional atomic operations.
For most conditional atomic operations, this is written as:
| If (${condition}), atomically updates @v to (${new}) with ${desc_order} ordering.
| Otherwise, @v is not modified and relaxed ordering is provided.
For the try_cmpxchg() operations, this is written as:
| If (${condition}), atomically updates @v to @new with ${desc_order} ordering.
| Otherwise, @v is not modified, @old is updated to the current value of @v,
| and relaxed ordering is provided.
Signed-off-by: Mark Rutland <mark.rutland@arm.com>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
Reviewed-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@kernel.org>
Reviewed-by: Nhat Pham <nphamcs@gmail.com>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20240209124010.2096198-1-mark.rutland@arm.com
Currently the atomics are documented in Documentation/atomic_t.txt, and
have no kerneldoc comments. There are a sufficient number of gotchas
(e.g. semantics, noinstr-safety) that it would be nice to have comments
to call these out, and it would be nice to have kerneldoc comments such
that these can be collated.
While it's possible to derive the semantics from the code, this can be
painful given the amount of indirection we currently have (e.g. fallback
paths), and it's easy to be mislead by naming, e.g.
* The unconditional void-returning ops *only* have relaxed variants
without a _relaxed suffix, and can easily be mistaken for being fully
ordered.
It would be nice to give these a _relaxed() suffix, but this would
result in significant churn throughout the kernel.
* Our naming of conditional and unconditional+test ops is rather
inconsistent, and it can be difficult to derive the name of an
operation, or to identify where an op is conditional or
unconditional+test.
Some ops are clearly conditional:
- dec_if_positive
- add_unless
- dec_unless_positive
- inc_unless_negative
Some ops are clearly unconditional+test:
- sub_and_test
- dec_and_test
- inc_and_test
However, what exactly those test is not obvious. A _test_zero suffix
might be clearer.
Others could be read ambiguously:
- inc_not_zero // conditional
- add_negative // unconditional+test
It would probably be worth renaming these, e.g. to inc_unless_zero and
add_test_negative.
As a step towards making this more consistent and easier to understand,
this patch adds kerneldoc comments for all generated *atomic*_*()
functions. These are generated from templates, with some common text
shared, making it easy to extend these in future if necessary.
I've tried to make these as consistent and clear as possible, and I've
deliberately ensured:
* All ops have their ordering explicitly mentioned in the short and long
description.
* All test ops have "test" in their short description.
* All ops are described as an expression using their usual C operator.
For example:
andnot: "Atomically updates @v to (@v & ~@i)"
inc: "Atomically updates @v to (@v + 1)"
Which may be clearer to non-naative English speakers, and allows all
the operations to be described in the same style.
* All conditional ops have their condition described as an expression
using the usual C operators. For example:
add_unless: "If (@v != @u), atomically updates @v to (@v + @i)"
cmpxchg: "If (@v == @old), atomically updates @v to @new"
Which may be clearer to non-naative English speakers, and allows all
the operations to be described in the same style.
* All bitwise ops (and,andnot,or,xor) explicitly mention that they are
bitwise in their short description, so that they are not mistaken for
performing their logical equivalents.
* The noinstr safety of each op is explicitly described, with a
description of whether or not to use the raw_ form of the op.
There should be no functional change as a result of this patch.
Reported-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Mark Rutland <mark.rutland@arm.com>
Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra (Intel) <peterz@infradead.org>
Reviewed-by: Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20230605070124.3741859-26-mark.rutland@arm.com
Mark Rutland