Moan: usage of __iormb() and __iowmb() outside of asm/io.h

Russell King - ARM Linux linux at arm.linux.org.uk
Mon Jun 8 11:47:01 PDT 2015


Guys,

I notice that we have users of __iormb() and __iowmb() outside of asm/io.h:

drivers/clocksource/timer-keystone.c:   __iowmb();
drivers/dma/cppi41.c:                   __iormb();
drivers/dma/cppi41.c:   __iowmb();
drivers/dma/cppi41.c:           __iowmb();
drivers/dma/cppi41.c:                   __iormb();
drivers/soc/ti/knav_qmss_queue.c:       __iowmb();

These are not official kernel barriers - the only reason they exist in
asm/io.h is purely to provide a barrier implementation _for_ creating
the accessors _in_ asm/io.h, which are macros, and therefore these
macros need to stay around for the same scope as those accessors.

As with all details which are an architecture matter, they are subject
to the whims of the architecture maintainer to provide whatever semantics
for them that the architecture maintainer deems fit: there is no official
requirement for anything of that nature to do anything, and no guarantee
that anything such a detail does today it will do so tomorrow.

This is why only official interfaces should be used, and if they do not
satisfy the requirements, then new official interfaces need to be 
proposed.  Don't ever poke about with stuff that's an architecture
implementation detail.

We've been here before with some of the cache flushing code - and people
have been burnt by it.

I do wish that people would see the difference between stuff which is
implemented to facilitate the implementation of an architecture detail
vs something which is provided for everyone's use.

I'm working on a patch which will completely remove these from view.
I would strongly suggest that these uses are removed from the above
code as a matter of urgency.

(Thankfully, it looks like it's only TI OMAP related code which has the
issue right now.)

-- 
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