From a8e0aead70b4af957e6b27b82fba849c6179b707 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Will Deacon Date: Wed, 4 Sep 2013 12:30:08 +0100 Subject: documentation: memory-barriers: clarify relaxed io accessor semantics This patch extends the paragraph describing the relaxed read io accessors so that the relaxed accessors are defined to be: - Ordered with respect to each other if accessing the same peripheral - Unordered with respect to normal memory accesses - Unordered with respect to LOCK/UNLOCK operations Whilst many architectures will provide stricter semantics, ARM, Alpha and PPC can achieve significant performance gains by taking advantage of some or all of the above relaxations. Cc: Randy Dunlap Cc: Benjamin Herrenschmidt Cc: Paul E. McKenney Cc: David Howells Signed-off-by: Will Deacon --- Documentation/memory-barriers.txt | 13 +++++++++---- 1 file changed, 9 insertions(+), 4 deletions(-) diff --git a/Documentation/memory-barriers.txt b/Documentation/memory-barriers.txt index 22a969cdd476..4af4cea8cff0 100644 --- a/Documentation/memory-barriers.txt +++ b/Documentation/memory-barriers.txt @@ -2465,10 +2465,15 @@ functions: Please refer to the PCI specification for more information on interactions between PCI transactions. - (*) readX_relaxed() - - These are similar to readX(), but are not guaranteed to be ordered in any - way. Be aware that there is no I/O read barrier available. + (*) readX_relaxed(), writeX_relaxed() + + These are similar to readX() and writeX(), but provide weaker memory + ordering guarantees. Specifically, they do not guarantee ordering with + respect to normal memory accesses (e.g. DMA buffers) nor do they guarantee + ordering with respect to LOCK or UNLOCK operations. If the latter is + required, an mmiowb() barrier can be used. Note that relaxed accesses to + the same peripheral are guaranteed to be ordered with respect to each + other. (*) ioreadX(), iowriteX() -- cgit v1.2.3-55-g7522