Memory corruption due to word sharing

[Linus Torvalds]

On Wed, Feb 1, 2012 at 2:45 PM, Paul E. McKenney
<paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com> wrote:
>
> My (perhaps forlorn and naive) hope is that C++11 memory_order_relaxed
> will eventually allow ACCESS_ONCE() to be upgraded so that (for example)
> access-once increments can generate a single increment-memory instruction
> on x86.

I don't think that is a semantic issue.

gcc could do it *today* with volatile accesses. It doesn't, because
volatiles are scary and basically disables a lot of optimizations. Why
would memory ordering be substantially different just because it has a
different name?

> New architectures might eventually might define things like atomic_inc()
> in terms of C++11 atomics, but let's start with the straightforward stuff
> as and if it makes sense.

SMP-atomic or percpu atomic? Or both?

We need both variants in the kernel. If the compiler generates one of
them for us, that doesn't really much help.

                          Linus