Re: Removing Mandatory Locks

Jeff Layton
2021-08-20T13:03:24Z

On Fri, 2021-08-20 at 14:38 +0200, Willy Tarreau wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 20, 2021 at 08:27:12AM -0400, Jeff Layton wrote:
> > I'm fine with any of these approaches if the consensus is that it's too
> > risky to just remove it. OTOH, I've yet to ever hear of any application
> > that uses this feature, even in a historical sense.
>
> Honestly, I agree. Some have fun of me because I'm often using old
> stuff, but I don't even remember having used an application that
> made use of mandatory locking. I remember having enabled it myself in
> my kernels long ago after discovering its existence in the man pages,
> just to test it. It doesn't rule out the possibility that it exists
> somewhere though, but I think that the immediate removal combined
> with the big fat warning in previous branches should be largely
> enough to avoid the last minute surprise.
>

Good point. It wouldn't hurt to push such a warning into stable kernels
at the same time. There always is a lag when we do something like this
before some downstream user notices.
--
Jeff Layton <jlayton@kernel.org>