documentation: Clarify wake-up/memory-barrier relationship
This commit adds an example demonstrating that if a wake_up() doesn't
actually wake something up, no memory ordering is provided.
Reported-by: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Reviewed-by: Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org>
Reviewed-by: Lai Jiangshan <laijs@cn.fujitsu.com>
Acked-by: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
diff --git a/Documentation/memory-barriers.txt b/Documentation/memory-barriers.txt
index f1dc4a2..a6ca533 100644
--- a/Documentation/memory-barriers.txt
+++ b/Documentation/memory-barriers.txt
@@ -1893,6 +1893,21 @@
<general barrier> STORE current->state
LOAD event_indicated
+To repeat, this write memory barrier is present if and only if something
+is actually awakened. To see this, consider the following sequence of
+events, where X and Y are both initially zero:
+
+ CPU 1 CPU 2
+ =============================== ===============================
+ X = 1; STORE event_indicated
+ smp_mb(); wake_up();
+ Y = 1; wait_event(wq, Y == 1);
+ wake_up(); load from Y sees 1, no memory barrier
+ load from X might see 0
+
+In contrast, if a wakeup does occur, CPU 2's load from X would be guaranteed
+to see 1.
+
The available waker functions include:
complete();