On Wed, 22 Dec 2010, Tejun Heo wrote:

quoted text
> > I'm a bit confused on this one.  The standard cmpxchg() takes a scalar
> > and a pointer, and returns a scalar.  The equivalent for the "double"
> > variety would be to return a compound object, basically:
> >
> > struct double_ulong {
> > 	unsigned long v[2];
> > };
> >
> > ... which can be returned in registers on both i386 and x86-64.

Really? How would that work? I tried with uint128 but could not get the
compiler to do the right thing.

quoted text
> > It's a bit clumsy from a type perspective, but I'm not sure that that is
> > a bad thing.  Doing too much type genericity has caused us problems in
> > the past.
>
> Yeah, the above might be better too.  Is there any reason to use
> cmpxchg_double on anything smaller?

Yes. You may want to use cmpxchg_double on 32 bit entities for backwards
compatibilities sake or any other smaller unit size. But those could also
be realized using this_cpu_cmpxchg_<double the size> by just aggregating
the amount.

If we can indeed pass 128 bit entities (as claimed by hpa) via registers
then the logical choice would be to do

	this_cpu_cmpxchg_16(pcp, old, new)

instead of cmpxchg_double. All parameters would have to be bit.
Then we can avoid the strange cmpxchg_double semantics and can completely
avoid introducing those.




--
unsubscribe notice
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/