Re: [PATCH] printk: robustify printk
From: Linus Torvalds
Date: Fri Aug 08 2008 - 17:03:52 EST
On Fri, 8 Aug 2008, Andrew Morton wrote:
>
> Why are we fixing this, btw? The problem has been there forever and
> people who hack the wakeup code could/should know about it anyway. All
> they need to do is to disable klogd during development. Did the
> problem recently become worse for some reason?
It hasn't beemn there forever at all.
Yes, there used to be reliance on the actual _scheduler_ locks. Doign a
wake_up() would cause runqueue locks etc to be taken.
But the xtime deadlock is fairly recent, and only happened with CFQ, I
think.
And _that_ is the irritating one. I personally wouldn't mind at all if
there is some printk() dependency on the core runqueue rq->lock or on the
RCU locking thing. But look at xtime_lock. THAT is a disaster.
Just grep for it.
So I personally actually like the RCU version best. Yes, it still depends
on really core locking. But it's really core and low-level and _confined_
locking, where a comment in a single place would probably suffice. Compare
that to all the places where we take the xtime_lock for writing!
Linus
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