Re: Announce: Linux-next (Or Andrew's dream :-))

Alan Cox
2008-02-12T23:10:31Z

On Tue, 12 Feb 2008 14:55:31 -0800
Greg KH <greg@kroah.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Feb 12, 2008 at 10:20:44PM +0000, Alan Cox wrote:
> > > I think the best way to get the serial drivers maintained would be to cat
> > > them all onto the end of synclink.c and hope that Paul thinks he did it.
> >
> > Well I've already broken the buffering so he'd fix it ;)
> >
> > We have a pile of old ISA drivers that are going to break soon with the
> > locking changes and a pile of USB drivers that when I looked at the
> > locking were so terminally broken I couldn't be bothered to fix them.
>
> Let me know which USB ones are broken, I'll work to fix them.

That I noticed doing an audit for unlocking the mctrl functions:

ir-usb: global variables without locking used in per port operations
iuu_phoenix: no locking on internal data structures
mos7840: ditto
option: ditto
kobil_sct: ditto

These drivers do interesting things (where interesting is probably not too
evil on a PC - except ir-usb) involving playing with data structures
without locks. It seems there was some kind of evolution along the way as
some drivers do have a carefully used port private data structure lock
(or two) but many do not.