Previously all of the IOCTL calls were protected by the Big Kernel Lock. If we break that aren't we allowing multiple callers into the IOCTL code on SMP machines that weren't allowed in before? Doesn't that mean that we have to check everything to make sure it is SMP safe?
as Alan mentioned it before, the BKL did not protect much, since the DRM code was freely doing copying from and to userspace, and hence dropping the BKL at those places.
I'm not sure that the main DRM heavyweight lock doesn't stop all this from happening.. a process has to take the lock before doing anything else...
The lock doesn't quite do this - it is intended to serialize access to hardware, so ioctls which don't touch hardware are historically not required to be called with the lock held. That distinction has been lost somewhat over time, and nowadays most drivers ensure they hold the lock before calling any DRM ioctl, and most DRM ioctls check that the lock is held early in their execution. This could use an audit, though.
Keith
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