On Tue, Jan 08, 2008 at 05:40:15PM +0100, Andi Kleen wrote:
quoted text
> Here's a proposal for some useful code transformations the kernel janitors
> could do as opposed to running checkpatch.pl.
> 
> Most ioctl handlers still running implicitely under the big kernel 
> lock (BKL). But long term Linux is trying to get away from that. There is a new
> ->unlocked_ioctl entry point that allows ioctls without BKL, but the code
> needs to be explicitely converted to use this.
> 
> The first step of getting rid of the BKL is typically to make it visible
> in the source. Once it is visible people will have incentive to eliminate it.
> That is how the BKL conversion project for Linux long ago started too.
> On 2.0 all system calls were still implicitely BKL and in 2.1 the
> lock/unlock_kernel()s were moved into the various syscall functions and then
> step by step eliminated.
> 
> And now it's time to do the same for all the ioctls too.
> 
> So my proposal is to convert the ->ioctl handlers all over the tree 
> to ->unlocked_ioctl with explicit lock_kernel()/unlock_kernel.

Thanks, Andi! I think it'd very useful change.
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