On Fri, 2008-08-01 at 16:26 -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:

> On Fri, 1 Aug 2008, David Miller wrote:
> >
> > Taking more than a few locks of the same class at once is bad
> > news and it's better to find an alternative method.
>
> It's not always wrong.
>
> If you can guarantee that anybody that takes more than one lock of a
> particular class will always take a single top-level lock _first_, then
> that's all good. You can obviously screw up and take the same lock _twice_
> (which will deadlock), but at least you cannot get into ABBA situations.
>
> So maybe the right thing to do is to just teach lockdep about "lock
> protection locks". That would have solved the multi-queue issues for
> networking too - all the actual network drivers would still have taken
> just their single queue lock, but the one case that needs to take all of
> them would have taken a separate top-level lock first.
>
> Never mind that the multi-queue locks were always taken in the same order:
> it's never wrong to just have some top-level serialization, and anybody
> who needs to take <n> locks might as well do <n+1>, because they sure as
> hell aren't going to be on _any_ fastpaths.
>
> So the simplest solution really sounds like just teaching lockdep about
> that one special case. It's not "nesting" exactly, although it's obviously
> related to it.

Do as Linus suggested. The lock protection lock is called nest_lock.

Note that we still have the MAX_LOCK_DEPTH (48) limit to consider, so anything
that spills that it still up shit creek.

Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>