Semantics and Behavior of Local Atomic Operations
  
  			    Mathieu Desnoyers
  
  
  	This document explains the purpose of the local atomic operations, how
  to implement them for any given architecture and shows how they can be used
  properly. It also stresses on the precautions that must be taken when reading
  those local variables across CPUs when the order of memory writes matters.
  
  
  
  * Purpose of local atomic operations
  
  Local atomic operations are meant to provide fast and highly reentrant per CPU
  counters. They minimize the performance cost of standard atomic operations by
  removing the LOCK prefix and memory barriers normally required to synchronize
  across CPUs.
  
  Having fast per CPU atomic counters is interesting in many cases : it does not
  require disabling interrupts to protect from interrupt handlers and it permits
  coherent counters in NMI handlers. It is especially useful for tracing purposes
  and for various performance monitoring counters.
  
  Local atomic operations only guarantee variable modification atomicity wrt the
  CPU which owns the data. Therefore, care must taken to make sure that only one
  CPU writes to the local_t data. This is done by using per cpu data and making
  sure that we modify it from within a preemption safe context. It is however
  permitted to read local_t data from any CPU : it will then appear to be written
  out of order wrt other memory writes on the owner CPU.
  
  
  * Implementation for a given architecture
  
  It can be done by slightly modifying the standard atomic operations : only
  their UP variant must be kept. It typically means removing LOCK prefix (on
  i386 and x86_64) and any SMP sychronization barrier. If the architecture does
  not have a different behavior between SMP and UP, including asm-generic/local.h
  in your archtecture's local.h is sufficient.
  
  The local_t type is defined as an opaque signed long by embedding an
  atomic_long_t inside a structure. This is made so a cast from this type to a
  long fails. The definition looks like :
  
  typedef struct { atomic_long_t a; } local_t;
  
  
  * How to use local atomic operations
  
  #include <linux/percpu.h>
  #include <asm/local.h>
  
  static DEFINE_PER_CPU(local_t, counters) = LOCAL_INIT(0);
  
  
  * Counting
  
  Counting is done on all the bits of a signed long.
  
  In preemptible context, use get_cpu_var() and put_cpu_var() around local atomic
  operations : it makes sure that preemption is disabled around write access to
  the per cpu variable. For instance :
  
  	local_inc(&get_cpu_var(counters));
  	put_cpu_var(counters);
  
  If you are already in a preemption-safe context, you can directly use
  __get_cpu_var() instead.
  
  	local_inc(&__get_cpu_var(counters));
  
  
  
  * Reading the counters
  
  Those local counters can be read from foreign CPUs to sum the count. Note that
  the data seen by local_read across CPUs must be considered to be out of order
  relatively to other memory writes happening on the CPU that owns the data.
  
  	long sum = 0;
  	for_each_online_cpu(cpu)
  		sum += local_read(&per_cpu(counters, cpu));
  
  If you want to use a remote local_read to synchronize access to a resource
  between CPUs, explicit smp_wmb() and smp_rmb() memory barriers must be used
  respectively on the writer and the reader CPUs. It would be the case if you use
  the local_t variable as a counter of bytes written in a buffer : there should
  be a smp_wmb() between the buffer write and the counter increment and also a
  smp_rmb() between the counter read and the buffer read.
  
  
  Here is a sample module which implements a basic per cpu counter using local.h.
  
  --- BEGIN ---
  /* test-local.c
   *
   * Sample module for local.h usage.
   */
  
  
  #include <asm/local.h>
  #include <linux/module.h>
  #include <linux/timer.h>
  
  static DEFINE_PER_CPU(local_t, counters) = LOCAL_INIT(0);
  
  static struct timer_list test_timer;
  
  /* IPI called on each CPU. */
  static void test_each(void *info)
  {
  	/* Increment the counter from a non preemptible context */
  	printk("Increment on cpu %d
  ", smp_processor_id());
  	local_inc(&__get_cpu_var(counters));
  
  	/* This is what incrementing the variable would look like within a
  	 * preemptible context (it disables preemption) :
  	 *
  	 * local_inc(&get_cpu_var(counters));
  	 * put_cpu_var(counters);
  	 */
  }
  
  static void do_test_timer(unsigned long data)
  {
  	int cpu;
  
  	/* Increment the counters */
  	on_each_cpu(test_each, NULL, 0, 1);
  	/* Read all the counters */
  	printk("Counters read from CPU %d
  ", smp_processor_id());
  	for_each_online_cpu(cpu) {
  		printk("Read : CPU %d, count %ld
  ", cpu,
  			local_read(&per_cpu(counters, cpu)));
  	}
  	del_timer(&test_timer);
  	test_timer.expires = jiffies + 1000;
  	add_timer(&test_timer);
  }
  
  static int __init test_init(void)
  {
  	/* initialize the timer that will increment the counter */
  	init_timer(&test_timer);
  	test_timer.function = do_test_timer;
  	test_timer.expires = jiffies + 1;
  	add_timer(&test_timer);
  
  	return 0;
  }
  
  static void __exit test_exit(void)
  {
  	del_timer_sync(&test_timer);
  }
  
  module_init(test_init);
  module_exit(test_exit);
  
  MODULE_LICENSE("GPL");
  MODULE_AUTHOR("Mathieu Desnoyers");
  MODULE_DESCRIPTION("Local Atomic Ops");
  --- END ---