Re: must-fix list for 2.6.0

Andrew Morton
2003-05-01T18:29:19Z

Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org> wrote:
>
> drivers/scsi/
>
> - large parts of the locking are hosed or not existant
> o shost->my_devices isn't locked down at all
> o the host list ist locked but not refcounted, mess can
> happen when the spinlock is dropped
> o there are lots of members of struct Scsi_Host/scsi_device/scsi_cmnd
> with very unclear locking, many of them probably want to become
> atomic_t's or bitmaps (for the 1bit bitfields).
> o there's lots of volatile abuse in the scsi code that needs to
> be thought about.
> o there's some global variables incremented without any locks

Thanks.

> fs/devfs/
>
> - there's a fundamental lookup vs devfsd race that's only fixable
> by introducing a lookup vs devfs deadlock. I can't see how this
> is fixable without getting rid of the current devfsd design.
> Mandrake seems to have a workaround for this so this is at least
> not triggered so easily, but that's not what I'd considere a fix..

Look. Please. If you have the time, let's just put it out of its misery.

I had two concerns with smalldevfs:

- It's dropping a semaphore (i_sem?) during its synchronous userspace
callout. That was for deadlock avoidance and may have introduced a race.

- The new userspace doesn't support the compatibility names. Just some
config file, or a tarball or a dang shell script full of `ln -s'
calls would fix that up, I think.