Re: [patch 04/41] cpu ops: Core piece for generic atomic per cpu operations

Nick Piggin
2008-06-12T03:40:46Z

On Thursday 12 June 2008 12:44, Rusty Russell wrote:
> On Thursday 12 June 2008 10:58:01 Nick Piggin wrote:
> > On Thursday 12 June 2008 09:39, Christoph Lameter wrote:
> > > On Wed, 11 Jun 2008, Rusty Russell wrote:
> > > > > 4. The modeling of local_t on atomic_t limits it to 32bit!
> > > >
> > > > Again wrong. And adding an exclamation mark doesn't make it true.
> > >
> > > Ewww ... Its atomic_long_t ahh. Ok then there no 32 bit support. What
> > > about pointers?
> >
> > sizeof(long) == sizeof(void *) in Linux, right?
> >
> > If you were to support just a single data type, long would probably
> > be the most useful. Still, it might be more consistent to support
> > int and long, same as atomic.
>
> Sure, but in practice these tend to be simple counters: that could well
> change when dynamic percpu allocs become first class citizens, but let's
> not put the cart before the horse...

Right, I was just responding to Christoph's puzzling question.

> Per-cpu seems to be particularly prone to over-engineering: see commit
> 7ff6f08295d90ab20d25200ef485ebb45b1b8d71 from almost two years ago.
> Grepping here reveals that this infrastructure is still not used.

Hmm. Something like that needs the question asked "who uses this?"
before it is merged I guess. If it were a trivial patch maybe not,
but something like this that sits untested for so long is almost
broken by definition ;)