Messages in this thread | | | From | Arnd Bergmann <> | Subject | Re: [GIT PULL v2] Preparation for BKL'ed ioctl removal | Date | Sat, 24 Apr 2010 21:54:02 +0200 |
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On Saturday 24 April 2010 20:47:17 Linus Torvalds wrote: > On Sat, 24 Apr 2010, Linus Torvalds wrote: > > > > I don't see the point, frankly. Especially not outside the merge window, > > but quite frankly, I don't see it in general. The whole thing seems to be > > designed to be inconvenient, and to have a config option that I > > fundamentally don't believe in (CONFIG_BKL). > > More detail: it still leaves that old "ioctl" function pointer that needs > the BKL and is ungreppable. So the whole and only point of the patch is to > make our current mess even more complex, with three different cases. No, > thank you. > > Quite frankly, if you want to get rid of the BKL in ioctl's and make them > easily greppable, then I would suggest a simple renaming: rename the > current '->ioctl()' thing to '->bkl_ioctl()', and mark it deprecated. No > new config options, no new games. Just rename it. No need to mark things > with CONFIG_BKL, when you can just see it by virtue of them using > 'bkl_ioctl'.
We want to do the rename in the next merge window and remove the old ->ioctl(), this patch is just a preparation for this so we can start queuing the patches for the rename in maintainer trees. The addition of the deprecated_ioctl() helper is not essential but let's us move all BKL users into loadable modules next.
The CONFIG_BKL stuff is not a requirement for doing this, but something we /also/ want to do in the next merge window, i.e. mark all BKL users as CONFIG_BKL, not just the ones that use the locked_ioctl (or bkl_ioctl).
I agree that it's now a bit late for this, but when I initially suggested this (before -rc3, IIRC), that would have given us the chance to queue up all the patches with a dependency on this for the next merge window. Now the current outlook is probably that we do a lot of the preparation work like this patch in 2.6.35-rc1, which moves the merge of the interesting parts out to the 2.6.36 timeframe.
Arnd
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