At 07.00 09/12/00 -0800, David S. Miller wrote:
> Date: Sat, 09 Dec 2000 16:07:03 +0100
> From: Roberto Fichera <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>
> 8 bits for a spinlock ? What kind of use we have here ?
>
>Sparc32 (like some other older architectures) do not have a
>word atomic update instruction, but it does have a byte spinlock.
>To conserve space and implement the atomic update properly, we
>use a spinlock in the top byte of the word.
There's any possibility ;-) to define it as
typedef struct { volatile char spinlock, volatile long counter } atomic_t;
>Also, this sematic was decided upon many eons ago, changing it a month
>before 2.4.0 just to deal with this mm->rss atomicity issue is not
>going to happen. The spinlock patch exists, and if nothing better
>comes up, we should just use it.
Indeed! You are right! I was thinking to optimize it, using a
spinlock/unlock we spent
several time for a inc.
Roberto Fichera.
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