Unserializing ioctl() system calls

From: Spinka, Kristofer
Date: Fri May 21 2004 - 21:47:41 EST


I noticed that even in the 2.6.6 code, callers to ioctl system call (sys_ioctl in fs/ioctl.c) are serialized with {lock,unlock}_kernel().

I realize that many kernel modules, and POSIX for that matter, may not be ready to make this more concurrent.

I propose adding a flag to indicate that the underlying module would like to support its own concurrency management, and thus we avoid grabbing the BKL around the f_op->ioctl call.

The default behavior would adhere to existing standards, and if the flag is present (in the underlying module), we let the module (or modules) handle it.

Reasonable?

/kristofer
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