On Wed, Sep 16, 2020 at 11:32:00AM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote: > On Wed, Sep 16, 2020 at 8:29 AM Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > > All fair, but some of us need to write code that must handle being > > invoked from a wide variety of contexts. > > Note that I think that core functionality is different from random drivers. > > Of course core code can (and will) look at things like > > if (in_interrupt()) > .. schedule work asynchronously .. > > because core code ends up being called from odd places, and code like > that is expected to have understanding of the rules it plays with. > > But something like RCU is a very different beast from some "walk the > scatter-gather list" code. > > RCU does its work in the background, and works with lots of different > things. And it's so core and used everywhere that it knows about these > things. I mean, we literally have special code explicitly to let RCU > know "we entered kernel context now". > > But something like a driver list walking thing should not be doing > different things behind peoples back depending on whether they hold > spinlocks or not. It should either just work regardless, or there > should be a flag (or special interface) for the "you're being called > in a crtitical region". > > Because dynamically changing behavior really is very confusing. Whew! I feel much better now. ;-) Thanx, Paul
