On Mon, 2014-03-24 at 08:22 +0200, Michael S. Tsirkin wrote: > What happens if someone then changes that NULL to something else? > Things will start to break in subtle way, won't they?
Sure. As anything else can break when/if using wrong API or in any change. Particularly in RCU protected code. Even a kzalloc() can be buggy. Note that smp_wmb() is hardly expensive in all these paths, so thats why I do not care anymore asking guys using RCU_INIT_POINTER(x, NULL) instead of rcu_assign_pointer() as I used to. When doing tree wide change (like in commit 2cfa5a0471fef43), I usually not do a dumb one, I take the time to read the code and check it for defects. I do not remember what kind of compiler warnings we had 3 years ago, But I do not want to spend more cycles on this subject... -- 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/
