Re: Steve's crashing 1.3 machine, cured?

really kuznet@ms2.inr.ac.ru (inr-linux-kernel@ms2.inr.ac.ru)
16 Apr 1996 19:12:29 +0400


Linus Torvalds (torvalds@cs.helsinki.FI) wrote:

: Sounds like a bad kerneld/module interaction. Maybe the sound module wa=
: s=20
: busy being loaded when kerneld started loading it again, or something=20
: like this. Bj=F6rn, is there anything that protects against that kind o=
: f=20
: "re-entrancy" problem?

No, current module stuff does no locking and even do not try to resolve
any race conditions. I encountered this problem very long ago.
F.e. when amd starts, it mounts a lot of NFS file systems,
and it starts happily only in 50% cases, is NFS is module.
Moreover, I will eat my hat, if someone will able to make kerneld
truly reliable without complete rewrite of module.c.

It was the main reason, why I rewrote all the module stuff
from the scratch. Unfortunately, it is orthogonal to standard
module implementation.

But anybody may get ftp.inr.ac.ru:/PATCH-89.gz and enjoy
(well, if he will succeed in patching and compiling 8)8)

Alexey Kuznetsov.