Re: [RFC/PATCH] sungem: Spring cleaning and GRO support

[Ben Hutchings <bhutchings@solarflare.com>]

On Wed, 2011-06-01 at 07:58 +1000, Benjamin Herrenschmidt wrote:
[...]
> > Is the pm_mutex really needed?  All control operations should already be
> > serialised by the RTNL lock, and you've started taking that in the
> > suspend and resume functions.
> 
> Well, it's been there forever and I need to get my head around it, but
> yes, the rtnl lock might be able to get rid of it, good point. I just
> actually added that :-)
> 
> So all ndo_set_* are going to be covered by rtnl including the ethtool ?

ethtool ops are almost all covered; the kernel-doc comment has the
details.

As for net_device_ops, locking varies (and really ought to be documented
in <linux/netdevice.h>).  At least ndo_set_mac_address, ndo_change_mtu
and ndo_do_ioctl (plus of course ndo_open and ndo_stop) are called
holding the RTNL lock.

> I don't really want to take the rtnl lock in the reset task (at least
> not for the whole duration of it), so I may have to be a bit creative on
> synchronization there.
[...]

Unless reset takes more than a second I wouldn't worry about it.

Ben.

-- 
Ben Hutchings, Senior Software Engineer, Solarflare
Not speaking for my employer; that's the marketing department's job.
They asked us to note that Solarflare product names are trademarked.