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[5/5] doc: Clarify historical disclaimers in memory-barriers.txt

Message ID 20231212172653.11485-5-neeraj.iitr10@gmail.com (mailing list archive)
State Accepted
Commit ad9446302919ee3a646ad667a9ea15f992685dca
Headers show
Series Documentation updates for v6.8 | expand

Commit Message

Neeraj Upadhyay (AMD) Dec. 12, 2023, 5:26 p.m. UTC 
From: "Paul E. McKenney" <paulmck@kernel.org>

This commit makes it clear that the reason that these sections are
historical is that smp_read_barrier_depends() is no more.  It also
removes the point about comparison operations, given that there are
other optimizations that can break address dependencies.

Suggested-by: Jonas Oberhauser <jonas.oberhauser@huaweicloud.com>
Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@kernel.org>
Cc: Alan Stern <stern@rowland.harvard.edu>
Cc: Andrea Parri <parri.andrea@gmail.com>
Cc: Will Deacon <will@kernel.org>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: Boqun Feng <boqun.feng@gmail.com>
Cc: Nicholas Piggin <npiggin@gmail.com>
Cc: David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com>
Cc: Jade Alglave <j.alglave@ucl.ac.uk>
Cc: Luc Maranget <luc.maranget@inria.fr>
Cc: Akira Yokosawa <akiyks@gmail.com>
Cc: Daniel Lustig <dlustig@nvidia.com>
Cc: Joel Fernandes <joel@joelfernandes.org>
Cc: Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net>
Cc: <linux-arch@vger.kernel.org>
Cc: <linux-doc@vger.kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Neeraj Upadhyay (AMD) <neeraj.iitr10@gmail.com>
---
 Documentation/memory-barriers.txt | 17 ++++++++++-------
 1 file changed, 10 insertions(+), 7 deletions(-)
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Patch

diff --git a/Documentation/memory-barriers.txt b/Documentation/memory-barriers.txt
index d414e145f912..4202174a6262 100644
--- a/Documentation/memory-barriers.txt
+++ b/Documentation/memory-barriers.txt
@@ -396,10 +396,11 @@  Memory barriers come in four basic varieties:
 
 
  (2) Address-dependency barriers (historical).
-     [!] This section is marked as HISTORICAL: For more up-to-date
-     information, including how compiler transformations related to pointer
-     comparisons can sometimes cause problems, see
-     Documentation/RCU/rcu_dereference.rst.
+     [!] This section is marked as HISTORICAL: it covers the long-obsolete
+     smp_read_barrier_depends() macro, the semantics of which are now
+     implicit in all marked accesses.  For more up-to-date information,
+     including how compiler transformations can sometimes break address
+     dependencies, see Documentation/RCU/rcu_dereference.rst.
 
      An address-dependency barrier is a weaker form of read barrier.  In the
      case where two loads are performed such that the second depends on the
@@ -560,9 +561,11 @@  There are certain things that the Linux kernel memory barriers do not guarantee:
 
 ADDRESS-DEPENDENCY BARRIERS (HISTORICAL)
 ----------------------------------------
-[!] This section is marked as HISTORICAL: For more up-to-date information,
-including how compiler transformations related to pointer comparisons can
-sometimes cause problems, see Documentation/RCU/rcu_dereference.rst.
+[!] This section is marked as HISTORICAL: it covers the long-obsolete
+smp_read_barrier_depends() macro, the semantics of which are now implicit
+in all marked accesses.  For more up-to-date information, including
+how compiler transformations can sometimes break address dependencies,
+see Documentation/RCU/rcu_dereference.rst.
 
 As of v4.15 of the Linux kernel, an smp_mb() was added to READ_ONCE() for
 DEC Alpha, which means that about the only people who need to pay attention