Re: [PATCH v4 1/4] drivers: hwspinlock: add framework

[Ohad Ben-Cohen <ohad@wizery.com>]

On Tue, Feb 1, 2011 at 1:38 AM, Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> wrote:
> It's a little irritating having two hwspinlock.h's.
> hwspinlock_internal.h wold be a conventional approach.  But it's not a
> big deal.
...

>> +/**
>> + * __hwspin_lock_timeout() - lock an hwspinlock with timeout limit
>> + * @hwlock: the hwspinlock to be locked
>> + * @timeout: timeout value in jiffies
>
> hm, why in jiffies?
>
> The problem here is that lazy programmers will use
>
>        hwspin_lock_timeout(lock, 10, ...)
>
> and their code will work happily with HZ=100 but will explode with HZ=1000.
>
> IOW, this interface *requires* that all callers perform a
> seconds-to-jiffies conversion before calling hwspin_lock_timeout().  So
> why not reduce their effort and their ability to make mistakes by
> defining the API to take seconds?

I considered that, but then decided to use jiffies in order to be
consistent with wait_event_timeout/schedule_timeout (although I don't
return the remaining jiffies in case the lock is taken before the
timeout elapses), and also to allow user-selected granularity.

But I do kind of like the idea of not using jiffies. We can probably
even move to msecs, since anyway this is an error condition, and
people who needs a quick check should just use the trylock() version.

I'll do a quick respin of the patches with that and the
hwspinlock_internal.h comment above.

Thanks,
Ohad.