From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Linus Torvalds Date: Fri, 08 Nov 2002 17:28:39 +0000 Subject: Re: [Linux-ia64] reader-writer livelock problem Message-Id: List-Id: References: In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: linux-ia64@vger.kernel.org On Fri, 8 Nov 2002, Linus Torvalds wrote: > > NOTE! I'm not saying the existing practice is necessarily a good tradeoff, > and maybe we should just make sure to find all such cases and turn the > read_lock() calls into read_lock_irqsave() and then make the rw-locks > block readers on pending writers. But it's certainly more work and cause > for subtler problems than just naively changing the rw implementation. Actually, giving this som emore thought, I really suspect that the simplest solution is to alloc a separate "fair_read_lock()", and paths that need to care about fairness (and know they don't have the irq issue) can use that, slowly porting users over one by one... Linus