6.0 Witness squawk
Brian Fundakowski Feldman
green at freebsd.org
Mon Oct 25 08:26:18 PDT 2004
On Mon, Oct 25, 2004 at 11:11:13AM -0500, Sam wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I'm almost finished porting my AoE (ATA over Ethernet)
> driver to 6.0 and have a question about a complaint witness
> is making.
>
> In general, is it ok to sleep with a mutex held?
>
> Specifically, it works like this in the driver.
> Each device struct has a mutex for guarding
> operations on it. Discovering devices is a two
> step process. First the device must respond to
> an AoE Query command, then it must respond to
> an ATA identify command. On the response to
> the latter, I grab the device mutex, examine
> the response and call disk_alloc() and disk_create().
>
> Both of these functions call malloc with M_WAITOK,
> the latter triggers the witness message.
>
> In my situation, I don't really mind if I sleep
> with the mutex since I can't do any useful work
> with the device anyway.
>
> This does leave the possibility that the netisr
> for AoE could sleep.
>
> Thoughts?
If you can't do any useful work, why do you have the mutex? Leave
the mutex operations for when exclusivity _is_necessary_, after the
major parts of initialization. No, it's not okay to sleep with a
mutex held -- it must be dropped a la msleep/cv/whatever.
--
Brian Fundakowski Feldman \'[ FreeBSD ]''''''''''\
<> green at FreeBSD.org \ The Power to Serve! \
Opinions expressed are my own. \,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,\
More information about the freebsd-current
mailing list