Re: [PATCH 1/19] MUTEX: Introduce simple mutex implementation

Geert Uytterhoeven
2005-12-15T20:33:21Z

On Thu, 15 Dec 2005, Steven Rostedt wrote:
> On Thu, 2005-12-15 at 11:21 -0800, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org> wrote:
> > >
> > > On Thu, 15 Dec 2005, David Howells wrote:
> > > >
> > > > FROM TO
> > > > ============================== =========================
> > > > DECLARE_MUTEX DECLARE_SEM_MUTEX
> > > > DECLARE_MUTEX_LOCKED DECLARE_SEM_MUTEX_LOCKED
> > > > Proper counting semaphore DECLARE_SEM
> > >
> > > That sounds fine.
> >
> > They should be renamed to DEFINE_* while we're there. A "declaration" is
> > "this thing is defined somewhere else". A "definition" is "this thing is
> > defined here".
>
> Why have the "MUTEX" part in there? Shouldn't that just be DECLARE_SEM
> (oops, I mean DEFINE_SEM). Especially that MUTEX_LOCKED! What is that?
> How does a MUTEX start off as locked. It can't, since a mutex must
> always have an owner (which, by the way, helped us in the -rt patch to
> find our "compat_semaphores"). So who's the owner of a
> DEFINE_SEM_MUTEX_LOCKED?

No one. It's not really a mutex, but a completion.

Gr{oetje,eeting}s,

Geert

P.S. Long live the common vocabulary ;-)
--
Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- geert@linux-m68k.org

In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But
when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.
-- Linus Torvalds