busy loops in kernel

Asim
2012-01-18T04:15:05Z

Hi,

I was just wanted to send a message to janitors -

We've identified a set of busy loops, waiting on hardware in the Linux
kernel. These are perhaps not the best way to wait for a device to
become ready and can occasionally freeze the system. These need to be
fixed by adding timeouts (for example by using rdtscll to wait for 2
clock cycles).

The list is here => http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~kadav/busy_waits.txt I
have added some caveats to be on the safe side. I will also add/update
this list as time passes by and as these are fixed (or as I identify
more).

Thanks,
Asim