Linus Torvalds writes:The cost of doing so seems to me to be well down in the noise - 44 bytes of extra kernel text on a ppc64 G5 config, and I don't believe the extra few cycles for the occasional extra load would be measurable (they should all hit in the L1 dcache). I don't mind if x86[-64] have atomic_read/set be nonvolatile and find all the missing barriers, but for now on powerpc, I think that not having to find those missing barriers is worth the 0.00076% increase in kernel text size. Paul. -
