I/O space write barriers
Some platforms, it seems, have an interesting property: writes to I/O
memory space from multiple processors may be reordered before reaching the
device. Even if the device registers are protected by a lock (pretty much
necessary to keep multiple processors from writing simultaneously and
confusing the device), writes issued by one CPU can arrive before those
from another, even if the second CPU had held the lock and issued its
writes first. The Itanium architecture in particular behaves this way,
though others may as well.
The answer, according to Jesse Barnes is the addition of a new type of memory barrier to force the ordering of writes to the device. Jesse's patch adds a new function, mmiowb(), which implements this barrier. He has also updated the qla1280 driver to make use of it.
Authors of PCI drivers are accustomed to coding a different sort of
barrier: reading from a device register to ensure that all writes have
actually been posted to the device. mmiowb() is a different,
lighter-weight mechanism. After a call to mmiowb(), writes might
still have not reached the device. Writes are not forced out; they
just have their ordering with respect to subsequent writes guaranteed. In
many situations, that sort of guarantee is all that is needed.
| Index entries for this article | |
|---|---|
| Kernel | I/O memory |
| Kernel | mmiowb() |