From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S932281AbWLOAxs (ORCPT ); Thu, 14 Dec 2006 19:53:48 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S932503AbWLOAxs (ORCPT ); Thu, 14 Dec 2006 19:53:48 -0500 Received: from ebiederm.dsl.xmission.com ([166.70.28.69]:55315 "EHLO ebiederm.dsl.xmission.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S932281AbWLOAxr (ORCPT ); Thu, 14 Dec 2006 19:53:47 -0500 From: ebiederm@xmission.com (Eric W. Biederman) To: Andrew Morton Cc: "Pallipadi, Venkatesh" , "Eric Dumazet" , "Greg KH" , "Arjan" , "linux-kernel" Subject: Re: kref refcnt and false positives References: <20061214163519.9e5f4f64.akpm@osdl.org> Date: Thu, 14 Dec 2006 17:53:14 -0700 In-Reply-To: <20061214163519.9e5f4f64.akpm@osdl.org> (Andrew Morton's message of "Thu, 14 Dec 2006 16:35:19 -0800") Message-ID: User-Agent: Gnus/5.110006 (No Gnus v0.6) Emacs/21.4 (gnu/linux) 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 Andrew Morton writes: > Guys, we have about 1000000000000000000000000000000 reports of weirdo > crashes, smashes, bashes and splats in the kref code. The last thing we > need is some obscure, tricksy little optimisation which leads legitimate > uses of the API to mysteriously fail. > > If we are allocating and freeing kref-counted objects at a sufficiently > high frequency for this thing to make a difference then we should fix that > instead of trying to suck faster. Agreed. Correct code maintenance certainly trumps performance. For the same reason someone reusing the data structure shouldn't assume the kref code left it in any particular state. So both sides should be liberal in what they accept. Eric