Re: [RFC patch 08/18] cnt32_to_63 should use smp_rmb()

David Howells
2008-11-07T23:56:44Z

Nicolas Pitre <nico@cam.org> wrote:

> I explained several times already why I disagree. Preemption is not a
> problem unless you're preempted away for long enough, or IOW if your
> counter is too fast.

That's my point. Say a nice -19 process gets preempted... what guarantees
that it will resume within, the time it takes the counter to wrap? Even if
the preempting process goes back to sleep, in that time a bunch of other
processes could have woken up and could starve it for a long period of time.

David