Re: [RFC] Refcounting of objects part of a lockfree collection

[Greg KH <greg@kroah.com>]

On Wed, Jul 14, 2004 at 11:19:49PM +0530, Dipankar Sarma wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 14, 2004 at 10:03:37AM -0700, Greg KH wrote:
> > On Wed, Jul 14, 2004 at 08:52:35PM +0530, Dipankar Sarma wrote:
> > > He is just adding lock-free support from an existing refcounting
> > > mechanism that is used in VFS.
> > 
> > If this is true, then I strongly object to the naming of this file, and
> > the name of the typedef (which shouldn't be a typedef at all) and this
> > should be made a private data structure to the vfs so no one else tries
> > to use it.  Otherwise it will be used.
> 
> I am reasonably sure that when that patch was done (months ago) kref wasn't
> there. Now that kref.[ch] is around, everything can be put there.

I agree.

> Now, if struct kref is shrinked (want patch ? ;-), all this 
> can possibly be nicely collapsed into one set of APIs for refcounting.

Sounds good to me.

> There aren't many users of kref yet, so this seems like a good
> time to do it. Was there any objection to shrinking it ?

None that I know of.  In fact, it's on my list of things to do, so a
patch from someone else to fix this would be greatly appreciated.

thanks,

greg k-h