>writes. However, something external to the device driver seems to prevent
>this. If a write is pending, no other writes get through to the driver
>(even though the pending process is nicely sleeping away). Other I/O calls

There's a semaphore protecting the inode from concurrency.  Look at sys_write 
in fs/read_write.c.  I can't think of any easy way to avoid this other than to 
manually up and down the semaphore inside your write routine.

p.



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