Commit 8ebc4232 authored by Frederic Weisbecker's avatar Frederic Weisbecker
Browse files

reiserfs: kill-the-BKL

This patch is an attempt to remove the Bkl based locking scheme from
reiserfs and is intended.

It is a bit inspired from an old attempt by Peter Zijlstra:

   http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0704.2/2174.html

The bkl is heavily used in this filesystem to prevent from
concurrent write accesses on the filesystem.

Reiserfs makes a deep use of the specific properties of the Bkl:

- It can be acqquired recursively by a same task
- It is released on the schedule() calls and reacquired when schedule() returns

The two properties above are a roadmap for the reiserfs write locking so it's
very hard to simply replace it with a common mutex.

- We need a recursive-able locking unless we want to restructure several blocks
  of the code.
- We need to identify the sites where the bkl was implictly relaxed
  (schedule, wait, sync, etc...) so that we can in turn release and
  reacquire our new lock explicitly.
  Such implicit releases of the lock are often required to let other
  r...
parent 74fca6a4
Supports Markdown
0% or .
You are about to add 0 people to the discussion. Proceed with caution.
Finish editing this message first!
Please register or to comment