On Tue, Jan 08, 2008 at 05:40:15PM +0100, Andi Kleen wrote: > Here's a proposal for some useful code transformations the kernel janitors > could do as opposed to running checkpatch.pl. > > Most ioctl handlers still running implicitely under the big kernel > lock (BKL). But long term Linux is trying to get away from that. There is a new > ->unlocked_ioctl entry point that allows ioctls without BKL, but the code > needs to be explicitely converted to use this. > > The first step of getting rid of the BKL is typically to make it visible > in the source. Once it is visible people will have incentive to eliminate it. > That is how the BKL conversion project for Linux long ago started too. > On 2.0 all system calls were still implicitely BKL and in 2.1 the > lock/unlock_kernel()s were moved into the various syscall functions and then > step by step eliminated. > > And now it's time to do the same for all the ioctls too. > > So my proposal is to convert the ->ioctl handlers all over the tree > to ->unlocked_ioctl with explicit lock_kernel()/unlock_kernel. Thanks, Andi! I think it'd very useful change. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe kernel-janitors" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
