Re: [patch] remove the BKL (Big Kernel Lock), this time for real

[Ingo Molnar]

* Ricky Beam <jfbeam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> On Wed, 15 Sep 2004, Ingo Molnar wrote:
> >yes, but progress in this area seems to have slowed down, and people are
> >hurting from the latencies introduced by the BKL meanwhile. Who cares if
> >some rare big chunk of code runs under a semaphore, as long as it's
> >preemptable?
> 
> "as long as it's preemptable" is the key there.  Not all arch's can
> run with PREEMPT enabled (yet) -- sparc/sparc64 for but one.  And at
> the moment, PREEMPT is a bit on the hosed side.

there's no problem at all - with my patch you'll still get the other
advantage:

- there is no time wasted spinning on the BKL if there's BKL contention

so if a platform doesnt support PREEMPT (or a user doesnt enable it)
then BKS-holding kernel code wont be preempted of course.

	Ingo
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