From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: "Paul E. McKenney" Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/9] Replace rcu_assign_pointer(x, NULL) with RCU_INIT_POINTER(x,NULL) Date: Thu, 20 Mar 2014 08:06:01 -0700 Message-ID: <20140320150601.GK4405@linux.vnet.ibm.com> References: <532B022C.8010505@broadcom.com> Reply-To: paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Cc: Monam Agarwal , netdev@vger.kernel.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, eddie.wai@broadcom.com To: Arend van Spriel Return-path: Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <532B022C.8010505@broadcom.com> Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-Id: netdev.vger.kernel.org On Thu, Mar 20, 2014 at 03:58:52PM +0100, Arend van Spriel wrote: > On 20/03/14 15:37, Monam Agarwal wrote: > >This patchset uses following coccinelle script to replace > >rcu_assign_pointer(x, NULL) with RCU_INIT_POINTER(x,NULL) > > > >@@ > >expression E; > >@@ > >- rcu_assign_pointer( > >+ RCU_INIT_POINTER( > >E, NULL) > > I am not very familiar with rcu functionality nor coccinelle, but it > looks too generic. I would think only NULL assignments during > initialization should use RCU_INIT_POINTER(). The first patch in the > series does it in a function called unregister_...(). Is it really > ok to do there? Hello, Arend, The thing that rcu_assign_pointer() is doing is ensuring that the initialization of a structure is carried out before storing a pointer to that structure. In the case of the NULL pointer, there is no structure to initialize, so nothing need be ordered. So, yes, rcu_assign_pointer(p, NULL) can always safely be converted to RCU_INIT_POINTER(p, NULL). ;-) Thanx, Paul