Re: [PATCH] WorkStruct: Implement generic UP cmpxchg() where an arch doesn't support it

Linus Torvalds
2006-12-06T19:54:58Z

On Wed, 6 Dec 2006, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
>
> That doesn't help, since assignment can't be guarded by any lock.

True. Pure assignment will be lost, and is only ok for the case of a pure
initializer (where nobody can see the old state).

Your problem will be, of course, that any architecture that does this in
hardware will just DoTheRightThing, and as such, broken architectures with
bad locking primitives will have to test and do source-level analysis
more.

Linus