Date: Fri, 17 Sep 2004 15:56:57 +0200
From: Andrea Arcangeli <andrea@novell.com>
To: William Lee Irwin III <wli@holomorphy.com>
Cc: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org,
       Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>, Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>,
       Arjan van de Ven <arjanv@redhat.com>, Lee Revell <rlrevell@joe-job.com>
Subject: Re: [patch] remove the BKL (Big Kernel Lock), this time for real
Message-ID: <20040917135657.GW15426@dualathlon.random>
References: <20040915151815.GA30138@elte.hu> <20040917103945.GA19861@elte.hu> <20040917132641.GR15426@dualathlon.random> <20040917134737.GS9106@holomorphy.com>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Disposition: inline
In-Reply-To: <20040917134737.GS9106@holomorphy.com>
User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.6i
Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org
Content-Length: 923
Lines: 18

On Fri, Sep 17, 2004 at 06:47:37AM -0700, William Lee Irwin III wrote:
> as the BKL is acquired before spinlocks in all instances. There are

that reinforces my argument, that's another case that can break with
this patch.

I don't think it has a chance to fix any bug, if something it will
trigger some deadlock or race condition, but OTOH I agree it should work
fine (all code I can recall by memory takes the BKL before any inner
spinlock too, and I don't think we left anything that depends on
smp_processor_id()), but again this is the kind of change that requires
some testing and cannot be shipped by default in a stable tree, it
requires config option at the very least.
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/