network statistics in SMP

[Harti Brandt]

Hi all,

I'm working on our network statistics (in the context of SNMP) and wonder, 
to what extend we want them to be correct. I've re-read part of the past 
discussions about 64-bit counters on 32-bit archs and got the impression, 
that there are users that would like to have almost correct statistics 
(for accounting, for example). If this is the case I wonder whether the 
way we do the statistics today is correct.

Basically all statistics are incremented or added to simply by a += b oder 
a++. As I understand, this worked fine in the old days, where you had 
spl*() calls at the right places. Nowadays when everything is SMP 
shouldn't we use at least atomic operations for this? Also I read that on 
architectures where cache coherency is not implemented in hardware even 
this does not help (I found a mail from jhb why for the mutex 
implementation this is not a problem, but I don't understand what to do 
for the += and ++ operations). I failed to find a way, though, to 
influence the caching policy (is there a function one can call to 
change the policy?).

Any opinions?
harti