Re: [GIT PULL] locking fixes

From: Linus Torvalds
Date: Wed May 03 2017 - 19:21:17 EST


This is from last merge window, and the reason I react now is that
nobody noticed or cared until we had a release..

On Mon, Feb 27, 2017 at 11:57 PM, Ingo Molnar <mingo@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Peter Zijlstra (1):
> locking/refcounts: Out-of-line everything

This one is all good generally, but it has one really stupid side
effect: it makes refcounting GPL-only.

That's just silly. These are functions that atomically add and
subtract one. The only thing that making them GPL-only can possibly do
is to make people hack around it, and lose the overflow handling
debugging in the process.

It also breaks any kref uses. Which is what drivers etc are supposed to use.

So that "move from inline to out-of-line" had a big subtle semantic
change that was probably not intentional, and certainly not
documented.

Linus