Re: What's an "MPSAFE" driver need to do?

[Jukka Ruohonen <jruohonen%iki.fi@localhost>]

On Thu, Feb 28, 2013 at 10:21:30PM -0500, Mouse wrote:
> Okay.  I don't think I can rely on that, though, because the things I'm
> porting that have led me to care about locking are not just device
> drivers. 

You make it sound like a difficult task. As I see it, making a normal/simple
device driver MP-safe shouldn't be that hard for a kernel programmer. 
Actually, I see no real differences to general programming besidds the
interrupt levels (which should be more clearly documented).

>One of them is a new socket address family (AF_TIMER -
> basically, a file descriptor attached to a setitimer-style timer) and
> the other, while it has a device driver interface, is also called into
> from various places in the disk drivers, disk drivers which may or may
> not be MPSAFE themselves.

This of course shows the cumulative effect of MPSAFE.

- Jukka.