Messages in this thread | | | Date | Thu, 13 Jul 2000 12:15:18 -0700 (PDT) | From | Linus Torvalds <> | Subject | Re: [Announce] BKL shifting into drivers and filesystems - beware |
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On Thu, 13 Jul 2000, Richard Gooch wrote: > > > > (b) means that we'll have these subtle incomptibilities between the > > release kernel and the development kernel, and backporting of fixes > > etc suddenly becomes much harder. > > But at some point you need to cut a new kernel version and live with > it.
Yes.
The thing I hate, though, is code like
#if LINUX_VERSION_CODE >= VERSION(2,5,10) lock_kernel(); #endif
in drivers. _Particularly_ in drivers. We'll end up living with 2.4.x for two years or more, judging by past performance, and we'll have especially driver writers that concentrate on the 2.4.x stuff for a long time.
Having driver interface inconsistencies like that is nasty, and the ones we _know_ that we'll have should be minimized.
This is another reason why the open/read/write/close series is particularly important to get done first: it's the stuff every driver tends to do. Things like "fasync" is less critical because even if it is used a lot by drivers, it tends to use the helper routines (so drivers often do not need to worry over-much about locking).
This shoul dhave been the last locking issue, though. We scale too well for words.
Linus
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