* Benjamin Herrenschmidt <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi Ingo ! > > Could you explain me precisely what is the race you are fixing by > adding local_irq_disable() to rest_init() ?
it can be bad for the idle task to hold the BKL and to have preemption enabled - in such a situation the scheduler will get confused if an interrupt triggers a forced preemption in that small window. But it's not necessary to keep IRQs disabled after the BKL has been dropped. In fact i think IRQ-disabling doesnt have to be done at all, the patch below ought to solve this scenario equally well, and should solve the PPC side-effects too. Tested ontop of 2.6.11-rc2 on x86 PREEMPT+SMP and PREEMPT+!SMP (which IIRC were the config variants that triggered the original problem), on an SMP and on a UP system. Ingo Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --- linux/init/main.c.orig +++ linux/init/main.c @@ -373,14 +373,9 @@ static void noinline rest_init(void) { kernel_thread(init, NULL, CLONE_FS | CLONE_SIGHAND); numa_default_policy(); - /* - * Re-enable preemption but disable interrupts to make sure - * we dont get preempted until we schedule() in cpu_idle(). - */ - local_irq_disable(); - preempt_enable_no_resched(); unlock_kernel(); - cpu_idle(); + preempt_enable_no_resched(); + cpu_idle(); } /* Check for early params. */ - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/