Re: Usage semantics of atomic_set ( )

[Roland Dreier <rdreier@cisco.com>]

 > I'm trying to implement atomic ops for a CPU which has no inherent
 > support for Read-Modify-Write Ops. Instead of using a global spin lock
 > which protects all the atomic APIs, I want to use a spin lock per
 > instance of atomic_t. This works well when atomic_t is unitary and
 > statically initialized using ATOMIC_INIT (where I can reset the
 > spinlock_t as well). However if atomic_t var is embedded within a
 > bigger struct which is allocated dynamically how to I init the
 > embedded spin lock. atomic_set ( ) is the closest choice, however I
 > don't think it's current usage in kernel code qualifies it to be
 > "initializer only".

A simple way to handle this might be to use a separate array of
spinlocks and hash each atomic_t to one entry in the array.  You could
look in asm-parisc and arch/parisc to see an implementation of this
that is already in the kernel.

 - R.