Safety

Safety

Posted Dec 15, 2005 14:55 UTC (Thu) by corbet (editor, #1)
In reply to: SMP alternatives by dw
Parent article: SMP alternatives

Changing the functioning of spinlocks could certainly create trouble if parts of the kernel are certainly holding locks! By my reading of the patch, there are a couple of defenses against that problem, though:

• A kernel built with the SMP alternatives maintains the counters for spinlocks, so lock state should be preserved in all configurations, and

• The hotplug CPU code has to quiesce the system anyway, so no atomic code should be running while alternatives are being applied.

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