Messages in this thread | | | Date | Mon, 29 Dec 2008 12:57:06 +0100 | From | Sam Ravnborg <> | Subject | Re: RFC: Fix f_flags races without the BKL |
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On Mon, Dec 29, 2008 at 04:13:52AM -0700, Jonathan Corbet wrote: > Accesses to the f_flags field have always involved a read-modify-write > operation, and have always been racy in the absence of the BKL. The recent > BKL-removal work made this problem worse, but it has been there for a very > long time. The race is quite small, and, arguably, has never affected > anybody, but it's still worth fixing. > > After pondering for a while, I couldn't come up with anything better than a > global file->f_flags mutex. There's no point in bloating struct file with > a mutex just for this purpose; it's hard to imagine that there will be any > real contention for this lock. Rather than open coded mutex how about adding a few helpers to set and clear the flags and hide locking there?
Not that your patch looks invasive..
Sam
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