Folks...

I noticed this in the context of the Alpha port, but I think it's
a potential issue for all MP-capable arch's.

On the Alpha, you're supposed to issue a memory barrier to ensure
that other "processors" see the changes you've made to a memory
location -- basically, you drain the write buffer.  The "processor"
may be an I/O device (such as a disk controller, DMA mapper, etc.)

What I'm not entirely clear on is if this is strictly necessary for
other CPUs on the system.  I was under the impression that this is
necessary when I wrote the Alpha simple lock primitives, issuing
an MB after the stl_c completed successfully.

While doing some hacking in the pmap module, it occurred to me that
this would be a good idea for PTEs, too.  But then I thought -- geez,
where does it end?  Do you issue an MB after frobbing with any random
linked list structure?  Etc.

I would appreciate some input on this -- I haven't yet read the
architecutre manual after thinking about this... and, indeed, it
may not be much of an issue, if a global data structure is protected
with locks, and those locks, when released, perform the necessary
memory barriers...

Anyway, I wanted to bring it up.

-- 
        -- Jason R. Thorpe <thorpej@zembu.com>