Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH] virtio_ring: use smp_store_mb

[Peter Zijlstra]

On Thu, Dec 17, 2015 at 12:32:53PM +0200, Michael S. Tsirkin wrote:
> Seems to give a speedup on my box but I'm less sure about this one.  E.g. as
> xchng faster than mfence on all/most intel CPUs? Anyone has an opinion?

Would help if you Cc people who would actually know this :-)

Yes, we've recently established that xchg is indeed faster than mfence
on at least recent machines, see:

  lkml.kernel.org/r/address@hidden

> +static inline void virtio_store_mb(bool weak_barriers,
> +                                __virtio16 *p, __virtio16 v)
> +{
> +#ifdef CONFIG_SMP
> +     if (weak_barriers)
> +             smp_store_mb(*p, v);
> +     else
> +#endif
> +     {
> +             WRITE_ONCE(*p, v);
> +             mb();
> +     }
> +}

Note that virtio_mb() is weirdly inconsistent with virtio_[rw]mb() in
that they use dma_* ops for weak_barriers, while virtio_mb() uses
smp_mb().

As previously stated, smp_mb() does not cover the same memory domains as
dma_mb() would.