[alsa-devel] [PATCH V4 1/2] ACPI / EC: Fix broken 64bit big-endian users of 'global_lock'

[James Bottomley]

On Fri, 2015-09-25 at 22:58 +0200, Rafael J. Wysocki wrote:
> On Friday, September 25, 2015 01:25:49 PM Viresh Kumar wrote:
> > On 25 September 2015 at 13:33, Rafael J. Wysocki <rjw at rjwysocki.net> wrote:
> > > You're going to change that into bool in the next patch, right?
> > 
> > Yeah.
> > 
> > > So what if bool is a byte and the field is not word-aligned
> > 
> > Its between two 'unsigned long' variables today, and the struct isn't packed.
> > So, it will be aligned, isn't it?
> > 
> > > and changing
> > > that byte requires a read-modify-write.  How do we ensure that things remain
> > > consistent in that case?
> > 
> > I didn't understood why a read-modify-write is special here? That's
> > what will happen
> > to most of the non-word-sized fields anyway?
> > 
> > Probably I didn't understood what you meant..
> 
> Say you have three adjacent fields in a structure, x, y, z, each one byte long.
> Initially, all of them are equal to 0.
> 
> CPU A writes 1 to x and CPU B writes 2 to y at the same time.
> 
> What's the result?

I think every CPU's  cache architecure guarantees adjacent store
integrity, even in the face of SMP, so it's x==1 and y==2.  If you're
thinking of old alpha SMP system where the lowest store width is 32 bits
and thus you have to do RMW to update a byte, this was usually fixed by
padding (assuming the structure is not packed).  However, it was such a
problem that even the later alpha chips had byte extensions.

James