Re: can I replace spin lock of stripe with mutex?

Re: can I replace spin lock of stripe with mutex?

[Neil Brown]

On Friday October 24, pengxihan@gmail.com wrote:
> hi, neil:
> I want to use hardware engine to do XOR. The driver is based on
> interrupt way, which will cause sleep. I found that in handle_stripe
> function spin lock of a stripe is used during donging XOR. Since
> between spin_lock and spin_unlock, sleep is not allowed, I want to
> replace it with mutex, does it make sense?
> 

What kernel version are you looking at?
I ask because for quite some months (years?) we have had explicit
support for hardware based xor using the "async_tx" extension to the
async-crypto API.
See  crypto/async_tx/ and drivers/dma/

That is a much more complete approach.  Just changing the lock type
would not really help, there are other reasons why we cannot sleep in
that code.

NeilBrown