From owner-freebsd-hackers Fri Oct 8 11:37:16 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from fw.wintelcom.net (ns1.wintelcom.net [209.1.153.20]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id C452414A25 for ; Fri, 8 Oct 1999 11:37:14 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from bright@wintelcom.net) Received: from localhost (bright@localhost) by fw.wintelcom.net (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id LAA29889 for ; Fri, 8 Oct 1999 11:56:31 -0700 (PDT) Date: Fri, 8 Oct 1999 11:56:31 -0700 (PDT) From: Alfred Perlstein To: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: read/write atomic? Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG I just spent a bit of time talking to the Linux Alan Cox and I was suprised to find out that it seems that Linux doesn't garantee read/write atomicity. It sounded somewhat strange however, it dawned on me that one should be using advisory locks instead of depending on that feature. Removing those locks would simplify a lot of the locking code, and probably aid in performance quite a bit. I know Matt Dillon wanted to implement byterange I/O locks to handle this, but it seems unnessesary in terms of complexity and performance gains. I know some people will be eager to just spout "Linux is broken" but what i'm really looking for is a situation where this would cause problems. Can anyone comment on this or reference a thread that has gone over this issue? thanks, -Alfred Perlstein - [bright@rush.net|alfred@freebsd.org] Wintelcom systems administrator and programmer - http://www.wintelcom.net/ [bright@wintelcom.net] To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message