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From: Oliver Neukum <oliver@neukum.org>
To: "David C. Hansen" <haveblue@us.ibm.com>,
        Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH] Remove needless BKL from release functions
Date: Thu, 22 Nov 2001 11:12:16 +0100
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Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@transmeta.com>,
        Alexander Viro <viro@math.psu.edu>,
        Rick Lindsley <ricklind@us.ibm.com>
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> Many of these patches simply remove the BKL from the file.  This causes
> no harm because the BKL was not really protecting anything, anyway.
> Other patches try to actually fix the locking.  Some do this by making
> use of atomic operations with the atomic_* functions, or the
> (test|set)_bit functions.  Most of these patches replace uses of normal
> integers which were used to keep open counts in the drivers.  In other
> some cases, a spinlock was added when the atomic operations could not
> guarantee proper serialization by themselves.  And, in very few cases,
> the existing locking was extended to protect more things.  These cases
> are very uncommon because locking is very uncommon in most of these
> drivers.

At least some of the removals in the input tree are probably wrong. You are 
introducing a race with deregistering of input devices.

	Regards
		Oliver
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