[PATCH] I/O space write barrier
On some platforms (e.g. SGI Challenge, Origin, and Altix machines), writes to I/O space aren't ordered coming from different CPUs. For the most part, this isn't a problem since drivers generally spinlock around code that does writeX calls, but if the last operation a driver does before it releases a lock is a write and some other CPU takes the lock and immediately does a write, it's possible the second CPU's write could arrive before the first's. This patch adds a mmiowb() call to deal with this sort of situation, and adds some documentation describing I/O ordering issues to deviceiobook.tmpl. The idea is to mirror the regular, cacheable memory barrier operation, wmb. Example of the problem this new macro solves: CPU A: spin_lock_irqsave(&dev_lock, flags) CPU A: ... CPU A: writel(newval, ring_ptr); CPU A: spin_unlock_irqrestore(&dev_lock, flags) ... CPU B: spin_lock_irqsave(&dev_lock, flags) CPU B: writel(newval2, ring_ptr); CPU B: ... CPU B: spin_unlock_irqrestore(&dev_lock, flags) In this case, newval2 could be written to ring_ptr before newval. Fixing it is easy though: CPU A: spin_lock_irqsave(&dev_lock, flags) CPU A: ... CPU A: writel(newval, ring_ptr); CPU A: mmiowb(); /* ensure no other writes beat us to the device */ CPU A: spin_unlock_irqrestore(&dev_lock, flags) ... CPU B: spin_lock_irqsave(&dev_lock, flags) CPU B: writel(newval2, ring_ptr); CPU B: ... CPU B: mmiowb(); CPU B: spin_unlock_irqrestore(&dev_lock, flags) Note that this doesn't address a related case where the driver may want to actually make a given write get to the device before proceeding. This should be dealt with by immediately reading a register from the card that has no side effects. According to the PCI spec, that will guarantee that all writes have arrived before being sent to the target bus. If no such register is available (in the case of card resets perhaps), reading from config space is sufficient (though it may return all ones if the card isn't responding to read cycles). I've tried to describe how mmiowb() differs from PCI posted write flushing in the patch to deviceiobook.tmpl. Signed-off-by: Jesse Barnes <jbarnes@sgi.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
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