Re: [PATCH /3] sh64: remove cli()/sti() from arch/sh64/*

From: Jim Nelson
Date: Tue Jan 04 2005 - 22:11:56 EST


Al Viro wrote:

On Tue, Jan 04, 2005 at 08:22:47PM -0600, James Nelson wrote:


This series of patches is to remove the last cli()/sti() function calls in arch/sh64.



Wait a minute. Is that just a blanket search-and-replace job? There is
a reason why cli/sti is marked obsolete instead of being silently #define'd
that way. Namely, in a lot of cases users of cli/sti are actually racy.

For such instances replacing these with local_... would not improve anything
(obviously) *and* would hide a trouble spot by silencing a warning.

I'm not familiar with the architectures in question, so it might very well
be that all replacements so far had been correct. However, I would really
like to see rationale for each of those warning removals to go along with
the patches.

Note that basically you are doing "remove the warning in foo.c:42 and
keep the current behaviour". The missing part is "current behaviour is,
in fact, correct in that place and does not deserve a warning because
<list of reasons>".



Everything I've looked at so far has been for single-processor systems AFAICT - embedded processors, evaluation boards, etc. I do not pretend to have intimate familiarity with the hardware in question, and I will be much more careful when I reach anything that can be plugged into an SMP box, but I was grabbing the low-hanging fruit first. The nasty stuff (drivers/char, for example) will come later.

That's why I cc'd the arch maintainers - figured they'd whack me with a cluebat if I'd overlooked something.

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