Re: [patch] spinlocks: remove 'volatile'

Linus Torvalds
2006-07-06T16:14:05Z

On Thu, 6 Jul 2006, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>
> Any other use of "volatile" is almost certainly a bug, or just useless.

Side note: it's also totally possible that a volatiles _hides_ a bug, ie
removing the volatile ends up having bad effects, but that's because the
software itself isn't actually following the rules (or, more commonly, the
rules are broken, and somebody added "volatile" to hide the problem).

That's not just a theoretical notion, btw. We had _tons_ of these kinds of
"volatile"s in the original old networking code. They were _all_ wrong.
Every single one.

Linus