linux-kernel - Re: [GIT PULL] locking fixes

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Date:   Thu, 4 May 2017 07:40:30 +0200
From:   Peter Zijlstra <peterz@...radead.org>
To:     Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>
Cc:     Ingo Molnar <mingo@...nel.org>,
        Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
        Thomas Gleixner <tglx@...utronix.de>,
        "Paul E. McKenney" <paulmck@...ibm.com>,
        Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
        Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@...uxfoundation.org>
Subject: Re: [GIT PULL] locking fixes

On Wed, May 03, 2017 at 04:21:01PM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> This is from last merge window, and the reason I react now is that
> nobody noticed or cared until we had a release..
> 
> On Mon, Feb 27, 2017 at 11:57 PM, Ingo Molnar <mingo@...nel.org> wrote:
> >
> > Peter Zijlstra (1):
> >       locking/refcounts: Out-of-line everything
> 
> This one is all good generally, but it has one really stupid side
> effect: it makes refcounting GPL-only.
> 
> That's just silly. These are functions that atomically add and
> subtract one. The only thing that making them GPL-only can possibly do
> is to make people hack around it, and lose the overflow handling
> debugging in the process.

These people are out-of-tree dubious licensed modules, right? I really
_really_ don't care about those.

> It also breaks any kref uses. Which is what drivers etc are supposed to use.

Greg KH had this to say:

"As all of the previous kref functions were in a GPL-only header file,
and included directly that way, they were already GPL-only symbols, so
there really was no change here except now the linker checks them.  If
you have questions about using inline GPL-only functions from a .h file,
in a non-GPL codebase, please consult your corporate lawyer to get
clarification."

 https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20170308094810.GB30552@kroah.com

> So that "move from inline to out-of-line" had a big subtle semantic
> change that was probably not intentional, and certainly not
> documented.

I'll take the not documented bit.