Re: [Qemu-devel] [RFC v2 PATCH 01/13] Introduce TCGOpcode for memory barrier

[Peter Maydell]

On 6 June 2016 at 21:30, Sergey Fedorov <address@hidden> wrote:
> On 06/06/16 22:28, Pranith Kumar wrote:
>> On Mon, Jun 6, 2016 at 3:23 PM, Richard Henderson <address@hidden> wrote:
>>> On 06/06/2016 10:11 AM, Pranith Kumar wrote:
>>>> If I read it correctly TCG_BAR_SYNC is equivalent to OR of all the
>>>> other four barriers. I am not sure if we can just construct SYNC like
>>>> this or if we need to define it explicitly though.
>>>
>>> AFAICS, sparc membar #sync is stronger.
>> I tried looking it up but it's not clear. How is it stronger? And do
>> we need those strong guarantees in our front-end/back-end?
>
> That is not clear for me either :( AFAIU, PPC's lwsync does allow stores
> to be reordered after loads but hwsync - not.

Yes, from the PoV of the other CPU. That is, for write-then-read by
CPU 0, CPU 0 will always read what it wrote, but other CPUs don't
necessarily see the write before the read is satisfied.
https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~pes20/ppc-supplemental/test7.pdf
describes the difference in sections 3.2 and 3.3, and has an
example in section 6 of a situation which requires a full
(hw)sync and an lwsync is not sufficient.

> I suspect Sparc's membar
> #Sync is used to ensure that some system operations are complete before
> proceeding with execution. I'm not sure we need to introduce this into
> TCG. It needs to be clear what is it and how to use it.

My reading of the manual is that the SPARC "membar #Sync" is like ARM
ISB -- it enforces that any instruction (whether a memory access or not)
before it must finish before anything after it can start. It only
affects the CPU that issues it (assuming you didn't also specify
any of the bits requesting memory barriers!) Since TCG doesn't attempt
to reorder instructions, we likely don't need to do anything except
maybe end the current TB. Also if we're still trying to do TLB
operations on other CPUs asynchronously we need to wait for them to
finish; I forget what the conclusion was on that idea.
PPC equivalent insn is isync I think.

thanks
-- PMM