Re: [GIT PULL] slab fixes for 3.2-rc4

[Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>]

Hello, Christoph.

On Thu, Dec 22, 2011 at 08:58:43AM -0600, Christoph Lameter wrote:
> Well that would be a pretty nice simplification of the API.
> Replace the fallback code for the preempt safe ones with the
> irqsafe fallbacks, then drop the irqsafe variants from percpu.h.

Yeah, it seems we're going that direction.

> > > The way that the cmpxchg things are used is also similar to transactional
> > > memory that is becoming available in the next generation of processors by
> > > Intel and that is already available in the current generation of powerpc
> > > processors by IBM. It is a way to avoid locking overhead.
> >
> > Hmmm... how about removing the ones which aren't currently in use?
> 
> Yep. Could easily be done. We can resurrect the stuff as needed when other
> variants become necessary. In particular the _and and _or etc stuff was
> just added to be backward compatible with the old per cpu and local_t
> interfaces. There may be no use cases left.

Yeap, and that one too.  Maybe we can finally kill the duplicate
confusing static/dynamic accessors too.  I'm planning to get to it in
several weeks but if anyone can beat me to it, please go ahead.

Thank you.

-- 
tejun