Re: [PATCH net v5 1/5] bnx2x: protect different statistics flows

On Mon, 12 Aug 2013 21:24:02 -0700 (PDT)
David Miller [off-list ref] wrote:

From: Stephen Hemminger <stephen@networkplumber.org>
Date: Mon, 12 Aug 2013 17:12:08 -0700

quoted

On Tue, 13 Aug 2013 02:24:59 +0300
"Dmitry Kravkov" [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

+	bool					stats_started;
+	struct semaphore			stats_sema;

Is there a reason to use a counting semaphore? Do you expect it to
be held across user process boundary? or want count > 1?

Use of semaphores as a locking primitive is discouraged,
instead us a mutex.

Would you please look at the feedback I gave these guys to the
previous iteration of these changes?

They were using custom locking primitives and semaphores gave
the best approximation to the semantics they were looking for.

Your right in this case sempahore makes sense because it is
used to hold off process while hardware responds.