Re: [PATCH 2/7] kfifo: move out spinlock

From: Alan Cox
Date: Mon Aug 17 2009 - 04:48:11 EST


I simply pasted randomly from the regexp output. The __ semantic for the
less sanity checking/unlocked/non synchronizing version of an API is all
over the kernel. Not suprisingly as it seems to be a Linusism looking at
some of the old patch sets.

> > And remember: its very hard to fix existing API documentation and
books.
> > It's doubly dangerous (and IMHO a complete no-no) to change the API of an
> > interface if you don't change it such that old code will not reliably get
> > a compile time failure.
>
> The patchet will cause unmigrated code to fail to build, won't it?

Yes but it won't fix the API docs.

So I still disagree with you. Adding _locked to the API end doesn't solve
any problems

You asked about mutexes but is get_locked() mutex locked, semaphore
locked, spinlocked, rwlocked ? So it doesn't do what you say.

What it does do is make the code more verbose, wider, more likely to go
over 80 columns and more typing.

Anyway I've made my point. I still think you are wrong on this one Andrew
but I think we have to simply continue to disagree.
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