Hello, On Wed, Aug 18, 2010 at 8:07 PM, Parmenides <mobile.parmenides@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Hi, > > For a critical section protected by a spin lock, kernel preemption is > disabled explicitly, probably to make the critical section atomic. > But, suppose that an interrupt occures in this critical section, > allowing interrupts can wreck the atomicity. So, why don't we disable > interrupts as a critical section is executing? Remember that you always must protect the data, and not the code. If your data is never accessed from interrupt handlers, then spin_lock is just enough. If instead, you access your data, both from interrupt and process context than you should use spin_lock_irqsave ([1]). thanks, Daniel. [1] http://lxr.linux.no/#linux+v2.6.35/Documentation/spinlocks.txt -- To unsubscribe from this list: send an email with "unsubscribe kernelnewbies" to ecartis@xxxxxxxxxxxx Please read the FAQ at http://kernelnewbies.org/FAQ