Re: [Ksummit-2010-discuss] [v2] Remaining BKL users, what to do

On Tue, Oct 19, 2010 at 09:00:09AM +1000, Dave Airlie wrote:

On Tue, Oct 19, 2010 at 4:43 AM, Greg KH [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

On Mon, Oct 18, 2010 at 05:42:06PM +0200, Arnd Bergmann wrote:

quoted

Out of the remaining modules, I guess i810/i830, adfs, hpfs and ufs might end
up not getting fixed at all, we can either mark them non-SMP or move them
to drivers/staging once all the others are done.

I recommend moving them to staging, and then retire them from there if
no one steps up to maintain them.

I think this sets a bad precedent, these drivers work fine. Removing
BKL from them is hard, and involves finding and booting hw that
developers don't have much time/interest in at the moment. Anyone who
has access to the i810 hw and has time to work out the locking has
more important things to be doing with modern hw, however it doesn't
mean we should just drop support for old drivers because they don't
have active maintainers. Removing the BKL from the kernel is a great
goal, but breaking userspace ABI by removing drivers isn't.

Should we just restrict such drivers to only be able to build on UP
machines with preempt disabled so that the BKL could be safely removed
from them?

Or what other idea do you have as to what could be done here?

I do have access to this hardware, but its on an old single processor
laptop, so any work that it would take to help do this development,
really wouldn't be able to be tested to be valid at all.

thanks,

greg k-h