As it is some callers of synchronize_irq rely on memory barriers
to provide synchronisation against the IRQ handlers. For example,
the tg3 driver does
tp->irq_sync = 1;
smp_mb();
synchronize_irq();
and then in the IRQ handler:
if (!tp->irq_sync)
netif_rx_schedule(dev, &tp->napi);
Unfortunately memory barriers only work well when they come in
pairs. Because we don't actually have memory barriers on the
IRQ path, the memory barrier before the synchronize_irq() doesn't
actually protect us.
In particular, synchronize_irq() may return followed by the
result of netif_rx_schedule being made visible.
This patch (mostly written by Linus) fixes this by using spin
locks instead of memory barries on the synchronize_irq() path.
Signed-off-by: Herbert Xu <herbert@gondor.apana.org.au> Acked-by: Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>