Andrew Morton wrote:

>Corey Minyard <minyard@acm.org> wrote:
>  
>
>>This patch fixes a race between the CMOS clock setting and the NMI
>> code.  The NMI code indiscriminatly sets index registers and values
>> in the same place the CMOS clock is set.  If you are setting the
>> CMOS clock and an NMI occurs, Bad values could be written to or
>> read from the CMOS RAM, or the NMI operation might not occur
>> correctly.
>>
>> Fixing this requires creating a special lock so the NMI code can
>> know its CPU owns the lock an "do the right thing" in that case.
>>    
>>
>
>hm, tricky patch.  I can't see any holes in it.  The volatile variable is
>awkward but should be OK on x86 and I can see the need for it.
>
>There's a preposterous amount of inlining happening in this code.  Hence
>your patch took the size of drivers/char/rtc.o from
>
>   text    data     bss     dec     hex filename
>   3657     540       8    4205    106d drivers/char/rtc.o
>to
>   5419     540       8    5967    174f drivers/char/rtc.o
>
>Do you think you could take a look at uninlining everything sometime?
>  
>
Ok, done.  With the attached patch I get ~2300 bytes less text in that 
file.  It makes CMOS_READ and CMOS_WRITE functions.  They were used all 
over the place in drivers/char/rtc.o, and the extra locking stuff took a 
lot of space.  I also fixed some comment grammer and I discovered that 
linux/smp.h needed to be included, since smp_processor_id() was being 
called.

-Corey