Network-related device drivers and MPSAFEty: status, and plans for 7.0

[Alexander Leidinger]

Robert Watson <rwatson at freebsd.org> wrote:

>> I don't think that we can assume that USB will get fixed for 7.0.  
>> It would be nice if it does, but we shouldn't plan to orphan these 
>> drivers because of it.
>
> If we can get the non-MPSAFE network driver set down to just the USB 
> drivers, that's probably sufficient to move the Giant work-arounds 
> into just that driver set, and not have it in the network stack in 
> general.  My goals with 7.x and the network stack MPSAFEty are really 
> to clean up the architecture, catch many of the edge cases and areas 
> of uncleanliness, etc.  However, this will involve relying on drivers 
> to lock some fields of ifnet, etc, which in turn relies on the 
> drivers being synchronized properly.  These sorts of cleanups really 
> rely on drivers universally being self-synchronizing, even if that 
> just means the workarounds move into a small set of drivers and out 
> of the stack.

I4B forces mpsafenet=0 (or how it is spelled... I'm not at a machine where I
can look it up). I assume you're talking about the functionality you can
modify with this sysctl...

Bye,
Alexander.

-- 
http://www.Leidinger.net  Alexander @ Leidinger.net: PGP ID = B0063FE7
http://www.FreeBSD.org     netchild @ FreeBSD.org  : PGP ID = 72077137
He who knows that enough is enough will always have enough.
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