Re: [Linux-ia64] reader-writer livelock problem

[Linus Torvalds]

On Fri, 8 Nov 2002, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> 
> NOTE! I'm not saying the existing practice is necessarily a good tradeoff,
> and maybe we should just make sure to find all such cases and turn the
> read_lock() calls into read_lock_irqsave() and then make the rw-locks
> block readers on pending writers. But it's certainly more work and cause
> for subtler problems than just naively changing the rw implementation.

Actually, giving this som emore thought, I really suspect that the
simplest solution is to alloc a separate "fair_read_lock()", and paths
that need to care about fairness (and know they don't have the irq issue)  
can use that, slowly porting users over one by one...

		Linus