Re: [PATCH] Remove needless BKL from release functions

Oliver Neukum
2001-11-22T10:14:19Z

> Many of these patches simply remove the BKL from the file. This causes
> no harm because the BKL was not really protecting anything, anyway.
> Other patches try to actually fix the locking. Some do this by making
> use of atomic operations with the atomic_* functions, or the
> (test|set)_bit functions. Most of these patches replace uses of normal
> integers which were used to keep open counts in the drivers. In other
> some cases, a spinlock was added when the atomic operations could not
> guarantee proper serialization by themselves. And, in very few cases,
> the existing locking was extended to protect more things. These cases
> are very uncommon because locking is very uncommon in most of these
> drivers.

At least some of the removals in the input tree are probably wrong. You are
introducing a race with deregistering of input devices.

Regards
Oliver