[PATCH] Decrapify asm-generic/local.h

Now that Christoph Lameter's atomic_long_t support is merged in mainline,
might as well convert asm-generic/local.h to use it, so the same code can
be used for both sizes of 32 and 64-bit unsigned longs.

akpm sayeth:

Q:

  Is there any particular reason why these routines weren't simply
  implemented with local_save/restore_flags, if they are only meant to
  guarantee atomicity to the local cpu?  I'm sure on most platforms this
  would be more efficient than using an atomic...

A:

  The whole _point_ of local_t is to avoid local_irq_disable().  It's
  designed to exploit the fact that many CPUs can do incs and decs in a way
  which is atomic wrt local interrupts, but not atomic wrt SMP.

But this patch makes sense, because asm-generic/local.h is just a fallback
implementation for architectures which either cannot perform these
local-irq-atomic operations, or its maintainers haven't yet got around to
implementing them.

We need more work done on local_t in the 2.6.17 timeframe - they're defined as
unsigned long, but some architectures implement them as signed long.

Signed-off-by: Kyle McMartin <kyle@parisc-linux.org>
Cc: Benjamin LaHaise <bcrl@kvack.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

0 files changed, 0 insertions, 0 deletions