Re: [RFC] kref, a tiny, sane, reference count object

[Nick Piggin]

Andrew Morton wrote:

> Nick Piggin <piggin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> > Andrew Morton wrote:
> >
> >
> > > Greg KH <greg@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > >
> > >
> > > > For all of those people, this patch is for you.
> > > It does rather neatly capture a common idiom.
> > But as Andi said - look at all the crap involved when:
> >
> > atomic_inc();
> > if (atomic_dec_and_test())
> >    release();
> > Also neatly captures that idiom.
>
> Well it does more than that, such as trapping the hard-to-diagnose bug
> of grabbing a refcount against a zero-ref object.
>
>
> > And you get more flexibility by being able to use atomic_set
> > directly too.
>
> Do I care about that?  I care more about being able to say "ah, it uses
> kref.  I understand that refcounting idiom, I know it's well debugged and I
> know that it traps common errors".  That's better than "oh crap, this thing
> implements its own refcounting - I need to review it for the usual
> errors".

OK good point.

-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/