Re: latest linus-2.5 BK broken

William Lee Irwin III
2002-06-23T06:35:10Z

On Sat, Jun 22, 2002 at 12:26:56PM -0700, Larry McVoy wrote:
> Not as stupid as having a kernel noone can maintain and not being able
> to do anything about it. There seems to be a subthread of elitist macho
> attitude along the lines of "oh, it won't be that bad, and besides,
> if you aren't good enough to code in a fine grained locked, soft real
> time, preempted, NUMA aware, then you just shouldn't be in the kernel".
> I'm not saying you are saying that, but I've definitely heard it on
> the list.

I've been accused of this, so I'll state for the record: my views on
locking are not efficiency-related in the least. They have to do with
ensuring that locks protect well-defined data and that locking
constructs are clean (e.g. nonrecursive and no implicit drop or acquire).
My duties are not directly related to locking, and I only push the
agenda I do as a low-priority kernel janitoring effort. As this is not
a scalability issue, I'll not press it further in this thread.

Cheers,
Bill