From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1030284AbWGFQOF (ORCPT ); Thu, 6 Jul 2006 12:14:05 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1030303AbWGFQOF (ORCPT ); Thu, 6 Jul 2006 12:14:05 -0400 Received: from smtp.osdl.org ([65.172.181.4]:15005 "EHLO smtp.osdl.org") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1030284AbWGFQOE (ORCPT ); Thu, 6 Jul 2006 12:14:04 -0400 Date: Thu, 6 Jul 2006 09:13:54 -0700 (PDT) From: Linus Torvalds To: "linux-os (Dick Johnson)" cc: Ingo Molnar , Andrew Morton , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, arjan@infradead.org Subject: Re: [patch] spinlocks: remove 'volatile' In-Reply-To: Message-ID: References: <20060705114630.GA3134@elte.hu> <20060705101059.66a762bf.akpm@osdl.org> <20060705193551.GA13070@elte.hu> <20060705131824.52fa20ec.akpm@osdl.org> <20060705204727.GA16615@elte.hu> <20060705214502.GA27597@elte.hu> <20060706081639.GA24179@elte.hu> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On Thu, 6 Jul 2006, Linus Torvalds wrote: > > Any other use of "volatile" is almost certainly a bug, or just useless. Side note: it's also totally possible that a volatiles _hides_ a bug, ie removing the volatile ends up having bad effects, but that's because the software itself isn't actually following the rules (or, more commonly, the rules are broken, and somebody added "volatile" to hide the problem). That's not just a theoretical notion, btw. We had _tons_ of these kinds of "volatile"s in the original old networking code. They were _all_ wrong. Every single one. Linus