On 19/04/21 19:14, Linus Torvalds wrote:
On Mon, Apr 19, 2021 at 2:36 AM Peter Zijlstra <pet...@infradead.org> wrote:
I also don't see how this is better than seq_cst.
But yes, not broken, but also very much not optimal.
I continue to feel like kernel people should just entirely ignore the
C++ memory ordering standard.
It's inferior to what we already have, and simply not helpful. It
doesn't actually solve any problems as far as the kernel is concerned,
and it generates its own set of issues (ie assuming that the compiler
supports it, and assuming the compiler gets it right).
The really subtle cases that it could have been helpful for (eg RCU,
or the load-store control dependencies) were _too_ subtle for the
standard.
And I do not believe Rust changes _any_ of that.
It changes it for the worse, in that access to fields that are shared
across threads *must* either use atomic types (which boil down to the
same compiler intrinsics as the C/C++ memory model) or synchronization
primitives. LKMM operates in the grey area between the C standard and
what gcc/clang actually implement, but there's no such grey area in Rust
unless somebody wants to rewrite arch/*/asm atomic access primitives and
memory barriers in Rust.
Of course it's possible to say Rust code just uses the C/C++/Rust model
and C code follows the LKMM, but that really only delays the inevitable
until a driver is written part in C part in Rust, and needs to perform
accesses outside synchronization primitives.
Paolo
Any kernel Rust code will simply have to follow the LKMM rules, and
use the kernel model for the interfaces. Things like the C++ memory
model is simply not _relevant_ to the kernel.
