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introduce sys_membarrier(): process-wide memory barrier (v8)

From:  Mathieu Desnoyers <mathieu.desnoyers@polymtl.ca>
To:  Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>, akpm@linux-foundation.org, Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com>, Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org>, "Paul E. McKenney" <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>, Nicholas Miell <nmiell@comcast.net>, laijs@cn.fujitsu.com, dipankar@in.ibm.com, josh@joshtriplett.org, dvhltc@us.ibm.com, niv@us.ibm.com, tglx@linutronix.de, peterz@infradead.org, Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu, dhowells@redhat.com
Subject:  [patch 0/3] introduce sys_membarrier(): process-wide memory barrier (v8)
Date:  Sun, 31 Jan 2010 15:52:54 -0500
Message-ID:  <20100131205254.407214951@polymtl.ca>
Archive-link:  Article, Thread

Hi,

Here is an updated version of the sys_membarrier system call. It implements a
system call that allows userspace to distribute the overhead of memory barriers
asymmetrically. It is particularly useful for Userspace RCU (liburcu), to allow
the RCU read-side to only issue compiler barriers, matched by calls to
sys_membarrier() in the userspace synchronize_rcu().

Even though sys_membarrier should be portable to other architecture as-is
without arch-specific modifications, I propose to incrementally reserve the
system call IDs as we test it on each architecture.

Here is a version that I think should be ready for merging. It is based on the
2.6.33-rc6 kernel. I would appreciate if people who gave their Acked-by in the
RFC rounds could confirm their Acked-by following the patch set updates.

Thanks,

Mathieu

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Mathieu Desnoyers
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