Hi, I read the document related to spinlocks in Documentation directory of kernel sources. Actually that doc is the reply from Linus to someone's query on mailing list. After reading that, I have a question related to read-write spinlocks: - As said in that document (Lesson 2 in that document), if we use read-write spinlocks, many readers can be in critical section at same time, but only one writer can be there in critical section. Does this mean, a situation like where one writer and many readers can be in critical section at same time, if yes, wont this lead to a problamatic situation as follows. Lets say we have a read-write spinlock on linked list and there are many reader traversing it and one writer updating it. If one reader is on a particular node and at the same time that node is deleted by the writer running on another CPU and it frees the node memory, wont the reader reading that node on other CPU put the system to crash ? I think if we allows the writer to be in critical section, no one else (not even readers) should be allowed there in critical section, because writer may effect what the reader are reading and a situation like above (if I am correct) can lead to crashes. Please correct me whereever I am wrong. -gd -- Kernelnewbies: Help each other learn about the Linux kernel. Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/kernelnewbies/ FAQ: http://kernelnewbies.org/faq/
