On Sun, Feb 08, 2015 at 01:47:29PM +1300, Michael Cree wrote:

On Sat, Feb 07, 2015 at 10:30:44PM +0000, Mathieu Desnoyers wrote:

quoted

quoted

On Fri, Feb 06, 2015 at 09:08:21PM -0500, Mathieu Desnoyers wrote:

quoted

A lockless_dereference() appears to be missing in llist_del_first().
It should only matter for Alpha in practice.

What could one anticipate to be the symptoms of such a missing
lockless_dereference()?

The Alpha kernel is behaving pretty well provided one builds a machine
specific kernel and UP.  When running an SMP kernel some packages
(most notably the java runtime, but there are a few others) occasionally
lock up in a pthread call --- could be a problem in libc rather then the
kernel.

Hm, if only UP alpha needs to be supported, odds are we could rip a lot
of odd stuff out of the kernel that deals with memory barriers and other
nasty locking things that the Alpha requires.

Would that be ok?  Or is someone somewhere going to want to be running a
SMP kernel on Alpha in the future?

thanks,

greg k-h