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-rw-r--r--Documentation/atomic_t.txt17
1 files changed, 17 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/atomic_t.txt b/Documentation/atomic_t.txt
index 913396ac5824..dca3fb0554db 100644
--- a/Documentation/atomic_t.txt
+++ b/Documentation/atomic_t.txt
@@ -56,6 +56,23 @@ Barriers:
smp_mb__{before,after}_atomic()
+TYPES (signed vs unsigned)
+-----
+
+While atomic_t, atomic_long_t and atomic64_t use int, long and s64
+respectively (for hysterical raisins), the kernel uses -fno-strict-overflow
+(which implies -fwrapv) and defines signed overflow to behave like
+2s-complement.
+
+Therefore, an explicitly unsigned variant of the atomic ops is strictly
+unnecessary and we can simply cast, there is no UB.
+
+There was a bug in UBSAN prior to GCC-8 that would generate UB warnings for
+signed types.
+
+With this we also conform to the C/C++ _Atomic behaviour and things like
+P1236R1.
+
SEMANTICS
---------