On 12/23, Oleg Nesterov wrote: > > Perhaps we should ask the maintainers upstream? Even if this works, I am > not sure this is _supposed_ to work. I mean, in theory spin_lock_irqave() > can be changed as, say > > #define spin_lock_irqsave(lock, flags) \ > do { \ > local_irq_save(flags); \ > spin_lock(lock); \ > } while (0) > > (and iirc it was defined this way a long ago). In this case "flags" is > obviously not protected. Yes, lets ask the maintainers. In short, is this code spinlock_t LOCK; unsigned long FLAGS; void my_lock(void) { spin_lock_irqsave(&LOCK, FLAGS); } void my_unlock(void) { spin_unlock_irqrestore(&LOCK, FLAGS); } correct or not? Initially I thought that this is obviously wrong, irqsave/irqrestore assume that "flags" is owned by the caller, not by the lock. And iirc this was certainly wrong in the past. But when I look at spinlock.c it seems that this code can actually work. _irqsave() writes to FLAGS after it takes the lock, and _irqrestore() has a copy of FLAGS before it drops this lock. And it turns out, some users assume this should work, for example arch/arm/mach-omap2/powerdomain.c: pwrdm_lock() and pwrdm_unlock() drivers/net/wireless/brcm80211/brcmfmac/fwsignal.c: brcmf_fws_lock() and brcmf_fws_unlock() seem to do exactly this. Plus the pending patch for drivers/scsi/pm8001/. So is it documented somewhere that this sequence is correct, or the code above should be changed even if it happens to work? Oleg. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-scsi" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html