[forgot to cc linux-kernel in the first try, sorry if you see it twice]
Greg KH <greg@kroah.com> writes:
> On Fri, Jan 10, 2003 at 05:19:08PM +0000, Alan Cox wrote:
> > The entire tty layer locking is terminally broken and nobody has even
> > started fixing it. Just try a mass of parallel tty/pty activity . It
> > was problematic before, pre-empt has taken it to dead, defunct and
> > buried.
>
> I've looked into this, and wow, it's not a simple fix :(
it has to be fixed for 2.6, no argument.
I took a look at it. I think the easiest strategy would be:
- Make sure all the process context code holds BKL
(most of it does, but not all - sometimes it is buggy like in
disassociate_tty)
I have some patches for that for tty_io.c at least
The local_irq_save in there are buggy, they need to take
a lock.
- Audit the data structures that are touched by interrupts
and add spinlocks.
At least for n_tty.c probably just tty->read_lock needs to be
extended.
Perhaps some can be just "fixed" by ignoring latency and pushing
softirq functions into keventd
(modern CPUs should be fast enough for that)
- Possibly disable module unloading for ldiscs (seems to be rather broken,
although Rusty's new unload algorithm may avoid the worst - not completely
sure)
Probably all doable with some concentrated effort.
Anyone interested in helping ?
-Andi
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Jan 15 2003 - 22:00:39 EST