On Wed, Dec 11, 2002 at 03:16:39AM -0800, William Lee Irwin III wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 11, 2002 at 04:51:53PM +0530, Vamsi Krishna S . wrote:
> > <snip>
> >
> > I am considering using a RCU-based list for notifier chains.
> > Corey has done some work on these lines to add NMI notifier
> > chain, I think it should be generalised on for all notifiers.
>
> A coherent explanation of how notifier locking is supposed to work
> would be wonderful to have. I'd like to register notifiers but am
> pig ignorant of how to lock my structures down to work with it.
>
Unless I am missing something, notifiers have always been racy.
No amount of locking you do in individual modules to prevent
races will help as the notifier chain is walked inside
notifier_call_chain() in kernel/sys.c. One would need to
add some form of locking there (*) so that users of notifier
chains need not worry about races/locking at all.
(*) converting the notifier chain to an RCU-based list guarentees
to modules using the notifier chains that their handlers will
not be called once the handler is unregistered.
> Bill
Vamsi.
-- Vamsi Krishna S. Linux Technology Center, IBM Software Lab, Bangalore. Ph: +91 80 5044959 Internet: vamsi@in.ibm.com - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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