[ovs-dev] [PATCH] RFC: datapath: Generic Netlink compatible locking.

Ben Pfaff blp at nicira.com
Sun Dec 19 15:04:31 UTC 2010


On Sat, Dec 18, 2010 at 8:45 PM, Jesse Gross <jesse at nicira.com> wrote:
> In other words, the general state of things would be:
> * Writes to device state (add/remote datapath, port, set operations on
> vports, etc.) are protected by RTNL.
> * Writes to other state (flow table modifications, set miscellaneous
> datapath parameters such as drop frags, etc.) are protected by genl.
> * Reads are protected by RCU.
> * There are a few special cases (mostly stats) that have their own
> synchronization but they nest under all of above and don't interact
> with each other.

This sounds promising.  I'll give it a shot.

One potential (perhaps not real) problem is that in kernels before
2.6.3something the genl_mutex is not exposed so there is no way for
code outside net/netlink/genetlink.c to take it.




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