On Thu, 28 Aug 2003 14:46:39 -0700
Ben Greear [off-list ref] wrote:

Since you can rename devices, that might not work.  A long time ago
I hashed the devices, both by name and by index...that gives good
lookup performance, at least.  As for create-time issues, that is
definately slow path, and even searching linearly 4 or 8k devices is
not a big deal (in my opinion).  So, why not make the hard-coded 100
limit be more like 8196 or something really large?  (It could still
be adjustable if needed.)

Right, it's also not going to fix the locking problems.

I would suggest two things:

1) Ben's hashing patch for lookups.

2) RCU'ing read access to the device list.