[dpdk-dev] memory barriers in rte_ring

[Stephen Hemminger]

On Thu, 27 Mar 2014 17:48:21 +0100
Olivier MATZ <olivier.matz at 6wind.com> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> The commit 286bd05bf7 [1] removed the memory barriers in the ring
> functions. This patch is present in DPDK since version 1.4.0r0, so I
> guess it does not cause any issue.
> 
> But after checking the excellent Linux kernel documentation about memory
> barriers [2], I'm wondering why memory barriers would not be required in
> that case.
> 
> To illustrate the previous behavior (before dpdk 1.4):
> 
>    ring_enqueue()
>      - move producer_head to reserve space in ring (atomically if
>        multi producers)
>      - write objects between producer_head and producer_tail
>      - wmb() to ensure that STORE operations are issued
>      - write producer_tail
> 
>    ring_dequeue()
>      - move consumer_head (atomically if multi consumers)
>      - rmb() to ensure that LOAD operations are issued: the read of
>        consumer_head must occur before the reading of objects ptrs.
>        In fact, rmb() is probably not needed here because knowing the
>        value of consumer_head is required before reading the objects
>        table.
>      - read objects between consumer_head and consumer_tail
>      - write consumer_tail
> 
> The memory barriers have been removed, but in my understanding at least
> the wmb() would be needed according to the generic memory barrier
> documentation. Maybe this is not needed on newest Intel processors?
> Could anyone from Intel enlight me on this?
> 
> Thanks & regards,
> Olivier
> 
> 
> [1] 
> http://dpdk.org/browse/dpdk/commit/lib/librte_ring/rte_ring.h?id=286bd05bf70d1da1b6017007276c267a1e012c1d
> 
> [2] http://lxr.free-electrons.com/source/Documentation/memory-barriers.txt

Short answer, only a compiler barrier is necessary.

Long answer: for the multple CPU access ring, it is equivalent to smp_wmb and smp_rmb
 in Linux kernel. For x86 where DPDK is used, this can normally be replaced by simpler
 compiler barrier. In kernel there is a special flage X86_OOSTORE which is only enabled
 for a few special cases, for most cases it is not. When cpu doesnt do out of order
 stores, there are no cases where other cpu will see wrong state.