Re: [RFC/PATCH] sungem: Spring cleaning and GRO support

[Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org>]

On Tue, 2011-05-31 at 23:17 +0100, Ben Hutchings wrote:
> On Wed, 2011-06-01 at 07:58 +1000, Benjamin Herrenschmidt wrote:
> [...]
> > > Is the pm_mutex really needed?  All control operations should already be
> > > serialised by the RTNL lock, and you've started taking that in the
> > > suspend and resume functions.
> > 
> > Well, it's been there forever and I need to get my head around it, but
> > yes, the rtnl lock might be able to get rid of it, good point. I just
> > actually added that :-)
> > 
> > So all ndo_set_* are going to be covered by rtnl including the ethtool ?
> 
> ethtool ops are almost all covered; the kernel-doc comment has the
> details.
> 
> As for net_device_ops, locking varies (and really ought to be documented
> in <linux/netdevice.h>).  At least ndo_set_mac_address, ndo_change_mtu
> and ndo_do_ioctl (plus of course ndo_open and ndo_stop) are called
> holding the RTNL lock.

Ok. The main annoyance for locking has always been set_multicast which
is called with a spinlock afaik.

> > I don't really want to take the rtnl lock in the reset task (at least
> > not for the whole duration of it), so I may have to be a bit creative on
> > synchronization there.
> [...]
> 
> Unless reset takes more than a second I wouldn't worry about it.

I don't want to take a spinlock for even near that, especially since we
do the reset on every link down. I suppose rtnl might be less of an
issue, I'll have a look.

Cheers,
Ben.