Commit 8d4840e8 authored by David Howells's avatar David Howells Committed by Ingo Molnar

locking/Documentation: State purpose of memory-barriers.txt

There has been some confusion about the purpose of memory-barriers.txt,
so this commit adds a statement of purpose.
Signed-off-by: default avatarDavid Howells <dhowells@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: default avatarPaul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Cc: corbet@lwn.net
Cc: dave@stgolabs.net
Cc: linux-doc@vger.kernel.org
Cc: will.deacon@arm.com
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1461691328-5429-2-git-send-email-paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.comSigned-off-by: default avatarIngo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
parent e7720af5
......@@ -19,6 +19,22 @@ in case of any doubt (and there are many) please ask.
To repeat, this document is not a specification of what Linux expects from
hardware.
The purpose of this document is twofold:
(1) to specify the minimum functionality that one can rely on for any
particular barrier, and
(2) to provide a guide as to how to use the barriers that are available.
Note that an architecture can provide more than the minimum requirement
for any particular barrier, but if the architecure provides less than
that, that architecture is incorrect.
Note also that it is possible that a barrier may be a no-op for an
architecture because the way that arch works renders an explicit barrier
unnecessary in that case.
========
CONTENTS
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