The BKL is still very prevalent in filesystem-heavy workloads. We have collected a set of patches which make 2.4.17's BKL impact closer to that of 2.5. A collection and description of these patches is available here.
A small number of patches actually fix broken locking, or institute locking where some was needed but not present. In general, though, most simply remove baseless BKL usage. For that purpose, the open/release routines were inspected for locking issues, but the rest of the module was usually not. If there was any analysis done beyond the open/release functions, that is noted in the following four tables.
The rollup of all 55 patches is available here (look at the bottom, under the locking_doc section). There are versions for the 2.4 and 2.5 trees. The tables listed below contain some information about each driver that was modified and in some cases indicate where there are still SMP locking issues remaining.
| Directory | # of files |
|---|---|
| arch/ | 6 |
| drivers/block/ | 4 |
| drivers/char/ | 23 |
| other miscellaneous drivers | 22 |
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Last updated: 11/30/01