Re: [PATCH 1/3] ARM: Introduce atomic MMIO clear/set

[Will Deacon <will.deacon@arm.com>]

On Sat, Aug 10, 2013 at 01:43:00PM +0100, Ezequiel Garcia wrote:
> Some SoC have MMIO regions that are shared across orthogonal
> subsystems. This commit implements a possible solution for the
> thread-safe access of such regions through a spinlock-protected API
> with clear-set semantics.
> 
> Concurrent access is protected with a single spinlock for the
> entire MMIO address space. While this protects shared-registers,
> it also serializes access to unrelated/unshared registers.
> 
> Signed-off-by: Ezequiel Garcia <ezequiel.garcia@free-electrons.com>

[...]

> +void atomic_io_clear_set(void __iomem *reg, u32 clear, u32 set)
> +{
> +	spin_lock(&__io_lock);
> +	writel((readl(reg) & ~clear) | set, reg);
> +	spin_unlock(&__io_lock);
> +}

I appreciate that you've lifted this code from a previous driver, but this
doesn't really make any sense to me. The spin_unlock operation is
essentially a store to normal, cacheable memory, whilst the writel is an
__iowmb followed by a store to device memory.

This means that you don't have ordering guarantees between the two accesses
outside of the CPU, potentially giving you:

	spin_lock(&__io_lock);
	spin_unlock(&__io_lock);
	writel((readl(reg) & ~clear) | set, reg);

which is probably not what you want.

I suggest adding an iowmb after the writel if you really need this ordering
to be enforced (but this may have a significant performance impact,
depending on your SoC).

Will