Re: [PATCH 10/20] hpfs: replace BKL with a global mutex

Nick Piggin
2011-01-27T05:01:11Z

On Thu, Jan 27, 2011 at 3:52 AM, Andi Kleen <ak@linux.intel.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 26, 2011 at 01:50:42PM +0100, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
>> On Wednesday 26 January 2011, Andi Kleen wrote:
>> > I don't think that's a very good idea, there's danger
>> > of holding it over IO and that would be really bad (as in like MINIX[1])
>> >
>> > It would be better to do it the i810 way and check for the number of
>> > CPUs at module init time and refuse to run if it's > 1
>>
>> I don't see much value of one evil over the other, but why not. The code
>> is going away anyway unless someone cleans it up further.
>
> I think it's fine because systems running OS/2 likely only have
> one CPU. This way these guys (if they exist) won't see any regression.

It would be really neat if there was a project to destage a lot of
these old filesystems and implement read-only support with fuse
implementations (not that I'm volunteering :P).

I almost think write access to a lot of these old filesystems is pretty
dangerous to support in the kernel due to lack of testing and bitrot.