On Sat, Feb 07, 2009 at 01:06:55PM -0700, Jonathan Corbet wrote:
> Traditionally, changes to struct file->f_flags have been done under BKL
> protection, or with no protection at all.  This patch causes all f_flags
> changes after file open/creation time to be done under protection of
> f_lock.  This allows the removal of some BKL usage and fixes a number of
> longstanding (if microscopic) races.

Looks good to me.


Reviewed-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>

One comments only tangentially related to the patch:


> diff --git a/drivers/char/tty_io.c b/drivers/char/tty_io.c
> index bc84e12..224f271 100644
> --- a/drivers/char/tty_io.c
> +++ b/drivers/char/tty_io.c
> @@ -2162,13 +2162,12 @@ static int fionbio(struct file *file, int __user *p)
>  	if (get_user(nonblock, p))
>  		return -EFAULT;
> 
> -	/* file->f_flags is still BKL protected in the fs layer - vomit */
> -	lock_kernel();
> +	spin_lock(&file->f_lock);
>  	if (nonblock)
>  		file->f_flags |= O_NONBLOCK;
>  	else
>  		file->f_flags &= ~O_NONBLOCK;
> -	unlock_kernel();
> +	spin_unlock(&file->f_lock);
>  	return 0;
>  }

Why is this code there at all?  It's a duplicate of
fs/ioctl.c:ioctl_fionbio minus the sparc special case, and from looking
at the flow in fs/ioctl.c I'm pretty sure FIONBIO never gets handed to
the chardev ioctl methods..