On Sun, Jan 19, 2014 at 12:04 AM, Paul E. McKenney <paul...@linux.vnet.ibm.com> wrote: > > OK, another approach would be to never add "select ARCH_USE_QUEUE_RWLOCK" > on Alpha, at least if the queued rwlocks really do want to atomically > manipulate bytes. After all, the Alpha systems that I know about don't > have enough CPUs to make queued rwlocks necessary anyway. > > Much simpler solution! > > Is this what you were getting at, or am I missing your point?
You're missing something. Just make the "writer" field be an "int" on little-endian archiectures (like alpha). There is no reason for that field to be a "char" to begin with, as far as I can tell, since the padding of the structure means that it doesn't save any space. But even if that wasn't true, we could make an arch-specific type for "minimum type for locking". So my *point* was that it should be easy enough to just make sure that any data structures used for locking have types that are appropriate for that locking. Linus -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/