Re: [RFC][PATCH 2/8] sched,idle,tile: Switch from TS_POLLING to TIF_POLLING_NRFLAG

[Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>]

On Fri, Apr 11, 2014 at 11:15:14AM -0400, Chris Metcalf wrote:
> It's unfortunate that you're rolling the fetch_or() unconditionally
> out of cmpxchg(), since some architectures (like tilegx) do have
> support for "fetchor" as a primitive atomic operation.  Currently the
> tilegx fetchor is only exposed to architecture-independent code via
> set_bit() and test_and_set_bit(), but perhaps it's worth having an
> atomic_or() in atomic.h so architectures can choose to optimize it?

Yeah, I know.. Linus hated atomic_or_return() -- which admittedly is a
little worse than fetch_or, because the operation isn't reversible.

Note that atomic_or_return() or rather, atomic_return_or() won't
actually work here because thread_info::flags is not a fixed typed
between archs, some have int, some have long.

Then again, when I proposed that thing, I didn't have a usage for it.
Still, Linus' main argument still holds, its a crappy primitive on x86
and one should not encourage its use by pretending its 'easy'.