Re: [PATCH] Remove BKL from fs/locks.c

[Trond Myklebust <Trond.Myklebust@netapp.com>]

On Tue, 2010-09-14 at 23:24 +0200, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> On Tuesday 14 September 2010 22:53:31 Linus Torvalds wrote:
> > Oh well. I guess there's no incremental way to do things sanely. And
> > nobody has patches to fix those users, I guess.
> 
> The only critical user is fs/lockd, I can easily handle the rest.
> When I talked to Bruce and Trond during LinuxCon, they told me that
> it should be possible to separate the bits of fs/lockd that lock
> against fs/locks.c and convert the former to use lock_flocks().


The NFSv4 client is quite ready to just switch to using lock_flocks()
now. There is nothing that depends on the magical properties of the BKL.
I do also have someone working on BKL removal for the NLM/lockd client
and am hoping that should be ready in a couple of weeks time.

The timeline for the server is up to Bruce, however.

> That would be enough to actually apply this patch without the
> nasty CONFIG_BKL check and with changes to the few other
> consumers of file locks. My original plan was to have my current
> patch in -next until that happens.

Would it be possible to at least merge a patch that defines
lock_flocks() (even if it just is an alias for lock_kernel()), so that
we can convert those bits of the lock recovery code that need to peek
into the inode->i_flock list ASAP?

Cheers
  Trond