[dpdk-dev] [PATCH v4 0/4] generic rte atomic APIs deprecate proposal

Phil Yang phil.yang at arm.com
Tue May 12 10:03:02 CEST 2020


DPDK provides generic rte_atomic APIs to do several atomic operations.
These APIs are using the deprecated __sync built-ins and enforce full
memory barriers on aarch64. However, full barriers are not necessary
in many use cases. In order to address such use cases, C language offers
C11 atomic APIs. The C11 atomic APIs provide finer memory barrier control
by making use of the memory ordering parameter provided by the user.
Various patches submitted in the past [2] and the patches in this series
indicate significant performance gains on multiple aarch64 CPUs and no
performance loss on x86.

But the existing rte_atomic API implementations cannot be changed as the
APIs do not take the memory ordering parameter. The only choice available
is replacing the usage of the rte_atomic APIs with C11 atomic APIs. In
order to make this change, the following steps are proposed:

[1] deprecate rte_atomic APIs so that future patches do not use rte_atomic
APIs (a script is added to flag the usages).
[2] refactor the code that uses rte_atomic APIs to use c11 atomic APIs.

This patchset contains:
1) changes to programmer guide describing writing efficient code for aarch64.
2) the checkpatch script changes to flag rte_atomicNN_xxx API usage in patches.
3) wraps up compiler __atomic built-ins with explicit memory ordering parameter.

v4:
1. add reader-writer concurrency case describing.
2. claim maintainership of c11 atomics code for each platforms.
3. flag rte_atomicNN_xxx in new patches for modules that have been converted to
c11 style.
4. flag __sync_xxx built-ins in new patches.
5. wraps up compiler atomic built-ins
6. move the changes of libraries which make use of c11 atomic APIs out of this
patchset.

v3:
add libatomic dependency for 32-bit clang

v2:
1. fix Clang '-Wincompatible-pointer-types' WARNING.
2. fix typos.


Phil Yang (4):
  doc: add generic atomic deprecation section
  maintainers: claim maintainers of c11 atomics code
  devtools: prevent use of rte atomic APIs in future patches
  eal/atomic: add wrapper for c11 atomics

 MAINTAINERS                                      |   4 +
 devtools/checkpatches.sh                         |  23 ++++
 doc/guides/prog_guide/writing_efficient_code.rst | 139 ++++++++++++++++++++++-
 lib/librte_eal/include/generic/rte_atomic_c11.h  | 139 +++++++++++++++++++++++
 lib/librte_eal/include/meson.build               |   1 +
 5 files changed, 305 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)
 create mode 100644 lib/librte_eal/include/generic/rte_atomic_c11.h

-- 
2.7.4



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