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authorSteven Whitehouse <swhiteho@redhat.com>2006-07-03 10:25:08 -0400
committerSteven Whitehouse <swhiteho@redhat.com>2006-07-03 10:25:08 -0400
commit0a1340c185734a57fbf4775927966ad4a1347b02 (patch)
treed9ed8f0dd809a7c542a3356601125ea5b5aaa804 /fs/jffs2/README.Locking
parentaf18ddb8864b096e3ed4732e2d4b21c956dcfe3a (diff)
parent29454dde27d8e340bb1987bad9aa504af7081eba (diff)
Merge rsync://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6
Conflicts: include/linux/kernel.h
Diffstat (limited to 'fs/jffs2/README.Locking')
-rw-r--r--fs/jffs2/README.Locking21
1 files changed, 21 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/fs/jffs2/README.Locking b/fs/jffs2/README.Locking
index b7943439b6e..c8f0bd64e53 100644
--- a/fs/jffs2/README.Locking
+++ b/fs/jffs2/README.Locking
@@ -150,3 +150,24 @@ the buffer.
Ordering constraints:
Lock wbuf_sem last, after the alloc_sem or and f->sem.
+
+
+ c->xattr_sem
+ ------------
+
+This read/write semaphore protects against concurrent access to the
+xattr related objects which include stuff in superblock and ic->xref.
+In read-only path, write-semaphore is too much exclusion. It's enough
+by read-semaphore. But you must hold write-semaphore when updating,
+creating or deleting any xattr related object.
+
+Once xattr_sem released, there would be no assurance for the existence
+of those objects. Thus, a series of processes is often required to retry,
+when updating such a object is necessary under holding read semaphore.
+For example, do_jffs2_getxattr() holds read-semaphore to scan xref and
+xdatum at first. But it retries this process with holding write-semaphore
+after release read-semaphore, if it's necessary to load name/value pair
+from medium.
+
+Ordering constraints:
+ Lock xattr_sem last, after the alloc_sem.