linux-kernel - Re: [rfc] "fair" rw spinlocks

lists.openwall.net		lists / announce owl-users owl-dev john-users john-dev passwdqc-users yescrypt popa3d-users / oss-security kernel-hardening musl sabotage tlsify passwords / crypt-dev xvendor / Bugtraq Full-Disclosure linux-kernel linux-netdev linux-ext4 linux-hardening linux-cve-announce PHC
Open Source and information security mailing list archives

Hash Suite: Windows password security audit tool. GUI, reports in PDF.

[<prev] [next>] [<thread-prev] [thread-next>] [day] [month] [year] [list]

Message-ID: <alpine.LFD.2.00.0911301409560.2872@localhost.localdomain>
Date:	Mon, 30 Nov 2009 14:11:58 -0800 (PST)
From:	Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>
To:	Thomas Gleixner <tglx@...utronix.de>
cc:	Peter Zijlstra <peterz@...radead.org>, Ingo Molnar <mingo@...e.hu>,
	Christoph Hellwig <hch@...radead.org>,
	Nick Piggin <npiggin@...e.de>,
	Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [rfc] "fair" rw spinlocks

On Mon, 30 Nov 2009, Thomas Gleixner wrote:
> 
> Yeah, forgot to mention sched.c, but that's solvable

It should be fairly easy to add a few 'spin_lock(&tasklist_lock)' around 
stuff that really depended on exclusion from writers. That should 
_hopefully_ be the rare case.

The biggest problem is that there will almost inevitably be things that 
get missed, and any races exposed by lacking locking will be _very_ hard 
to debug and trigger. So what I'd be worried about is not getting to a 
"practically working" state, but any really subtle cases that nobody 
really hits in practice.

			Linus
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@...r.kernel.org
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/