[dpdk-dev] atomic operations

[Ruifeng Wang]

Removed invalid mail address.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Thomas Monjalon <thomas at monjalon.net>
> Sent: Sunday, July 4, 2021 8:38 AM
> To: Honnappa Nagarahalli <Honnappa.Nagarahalli at arm.com>; Ruifeng Wang
> <Ruifeng.Wang at arm.com>; Phil Yang <Phil.Yang at arm.com>
> Cc: dev at dpdk.org; bruce.richardson at intel.com;
> konstantin.ananyev at intel.com; dev at dpdk.org;
> david.marchand at redhat.com; David Christensen <drc at linux.vnet.ibm.com>
> Subject: Re: [dpdk-dev] atomic operations
> 
> 03/07/2021 13:29, Thomas Monjalon:
> > In the deprecation notices of DPDK 21.05, we can still read this:
> > "
> > * rte_atomicNN_xxx: These APIs do not take memory order parameter.
> This does
> >   not allow for writing optimized code for all the CPU architectures
> supported
> >   in DPDK. DPDK will adopt C11 atomic operations semantics and provide
> wrappers
> >   using C11 atomic built-ins. These wrappers must be used for patches that
> >   need to be merged in 20.08 onwards. This change will not introduce any
> >   performance degradation.
> >
> > * rte_smp_*mb: These APIs provide full barrier functionality. However,
> many
> >   use cases do not require full barriers. To support such use cases, DPDK will
> >   adopt C11 barrier semantics and provide wrappers using C11 atomic built-
> ins.
> >   These wrappers must be used for patches that need to be merged in
> 20.08
> >   onwards. This change will not introduce any performance degradation.
> > "
> 
> The only new wrapper is rte_atomic_thread_fence(). What else?
Yes. The decision was to use GCC atomic built-ins directly. 
And rte_atomic_thread_fence() is an exception. It is a wrapper of __atomic_thread_fence(), because mem order __ATOMIC_SEQ_CST has an optimized implementation for x86.

> We are missing clear recommendations.
> 
> > Should we keep these notifications forever?
Targeting to obsolete APIs rte_atomicNN_xxx and rte_smp_*mb. 
Arm is working on replace occurrences with equivalent atomic built-ins.
There is still a lot work to do in drivers.

> >
> > It is very difficult to find which wrapper to use.
> 
> We should make function names explicit instead of "These".
> 
> > This is the guide we have:
> > https://doc.dpdk.org/guides/prog_guide/writing_efficient_code.html#loc
> > ks-and-atomic-operations
> > There are 2 blog posts:
> > https://www.dpdk.org/blog/2021/03/26/dpdk-adopts-the-c11-memory-
> model/
> > https://www.dpdk.org/blog/2021/06/09/reader-writer-concurrency/
> >
> > Basically it says we should use "__atomic builtins" but there is
> > example for simple situations like counters, memory barriers, etc.
> 
> Precision: I meant "there is *no* example".
> 
> > Please who could work on improving the documentation?
Agree that the documentation needs improve.
Add link to list of atomic built-ins and the above mentioned blog posts can be part of the improvement.

> 
> One simple example: increment a counter atomically.
> __atomic_fetch_add(&counter, 1, __ATOMIC_RELAXED); or
> __atomic_add_fetch(&counter, 1, __ATOMIC_RELAXED);
>