After spending *far* too long getting lxr installed and working, I finally have
my favorite source browser working in the same place I email from :-) Meaning
that the next time I get hit with a tough question I'll be able to respond
having to go home and browsing the source first.
BTW, lxr is a wonderful thing and everybody who has the patience should think
about installing and running it locally. It can do far more for you than just
index the Linux kernel. I see that by going to the effort of installing it I've
now jumped two development versions ahead of the official site
(http://lxr.linux.no/source/) so it was worth it.
So now it's time to start asking questions. Just jumping in at a place I felt I
knew pretty well back in 2.2.13, I'm now looking at the 2.4.0 getblk, and I see
it's changed somewhat. Finding and removing a block from the free list is now
bracketed by a spinlock pair. First question: why do we use atomic_set to set
the initial buffer use count if this is already protected by a spinlock?
I thought I'd start with an easy question just to do a reality check. That's
all for today, my excuse being that lxr bit such a big chunk out of my day I
only had time for one question. Tomorrow hopefully I'll start getting at the
things I need to know in order to do the right thing with tail blocks.
--
Daniel
