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From: Roland Dreier <roland@topspin.com>
To: Lee Revell <rlrevell@joe-job.com>
Cc: Dave Hansen <haveblue@us.ibm.com>, Josh Aas <josha@sgi.com>,
	Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
	steiner@sgi.com
Subject: Re: bkl cleanup in do_sysctl
Date: Tue, 10 Aug 2004 12:16:08 -0700	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <52n0126byf.fsf@topspin.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <1092163919.782.54.camel@mindpipe> (Lee Revell's message of "Tue, 10 Aug 2004 14:51:59 -0400")

    Lee> Someone once suggested that newbies who show up on LKML
    Lee> wanting to learn kernel hacking should be assigned to find
    Lee> one use of the BKL and replace it with proper locking.

Unfortunately most of the remaining BKL uses seem to be very subtle.
Removing lock_kernel() correctly requires a deep understanding of the
global locking semantics and may be very invasive.  In the end it's
also hard to be sure bugs haven't been introduced.

    Lee> For example reiserfs uses the BKL for all write locking (!),
    Lee> but it probably would not be too hard to fix, because you can
    Lee> just look at another filesystem that has proper locking.

Fixing up a filesystem's write locking doesn't sound like a very good
newbie project to me.

 - R.

  reply	other threads:[~2004-08-10 19:18 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 7+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2004-08-10 16:58 bkl cleanup in do_sysctl Josh Aas
2004-08-10 17:28 ` Dave Hansen
2004-08-10 18:51   ` Lee Revell
2004-08-10 19:16     ` Roland Dreier [this message]
2004-08-10 19:21       ` Lee Revell
2004-08-10 19:46     ` Hans Reiser
2004-08-10 20:10       ` Lee Revell

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