[PATCH] ppc64: extra barrier in I/O operations
At the moment, on PPC64, the instruction we use for wmb() doesn't order cacheable stores vs. non-cacheable stores. (It does order cacheable vs. cacheable and non-cacheable vs. non-cacheable.) This causes problems in the sort of driver code that writes stuff into memory, does a wmb(), then a writel to the device to start a DMA operation to read the stuff it has just written to memory. This patch solves the problem by adding a sync instruction before the store in the write* and out* macros. The sync is a full barrier that orders all loads and stores, cacheable or not. The patch also moves the eieio instruction that we had after the store to before the load in the read* and in* macros. With the sync before the store, we don't need an eieio as well in a sequence of stores, but we still need an eieio between a store and a load. I think it is better to do this than to turn wmb() into a full memory barrier (a sync instruction) because the full barrier is slow and isn't needed with the sync in the write*/out* macros. This way, write*/out* are fully ordered with respect to preceding loads and stores, which is what driver writers expect, and we avoid penalizing users of wmb() who are only doing cacheable stores.
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