On Sat, Nov 25, 2000 at 03:49:25PM -0200, Rik van Riel wrote:
> On Sat, 25 Nov 2000, Roger Larsson wrote:
>
> > Questions:
> > What are _trylocks supposed to return?
>
> It depends on the type of _trylock ;(
>
> > Does spin_trylock and down_trylock behave differently?
> > Why isn't the expected return value documented?
>
> The whole trylock stuff is, IMHO, a big mess. When you
> change from one type of trylock to another, you may be
> forced to invert the logic of your code since the return
> code from the different locks is different.
>
> For bitflags, for example, the trylock returns the state
> the bit had before the lock (ie. 1 if the thing was already
> locked).
I assume you're talking about test_and_{set,clear}_bit here. Their return
value isn't consistent with the other _trylock functions since they're not
_trylock functions.
I think the real problem is that people use test_and_set_bit for locks,
which is almost never[1] a good idea. The overhead for a semaphore shouldn't
be too much in most cases, and that way it is obvious what you want to do -
and, hopefully, even more obvious if you end up with a semaphore that can
be turned into a spinlock without further changes.
> For spinlocks, it'll probably return something else ;/
_trylock functions return 0 for success.
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