Re: [PATCH -v4 1/8] locking/drm: Kill mutex trickery

[Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>]

On Fri, Oct 7, 2016 at 8:43 AM, Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org> wrote:
>
> So something like the below would serve as a replacement for your
> previous hacks. Is this API something acceptable to people? Ingo,
> Thomas?

Ugh. I think the concept is fine, but can we place make these enum's
be all upper case or something to make them really stand out visually.

Also, it's a bit subtle how this depends on the success/failure enums
to just have the same values as the return value of the non-try mutex.
So a comment about why that particular numbering is important above
the enum definition, please?

You _kind_ of imply that magic numbering requirementby explicitly
using " = 0" and " = 1", but quite frankly, in many ways that's really
nasty, because I can see somebody looking at that enum definition and
saying "that makes no sense: it sets *two* of the three values
explicitly, and the values it sets explicitly are the same that it
would get implicitly _anyway_, so I'll just clean this up".

So I really think that enum needs a comment on the forced choice of
values, and making them all caps would make the users more obvious, I
think.

The other choice would be to just make the choices be negative (==
recursive), zero (== failed) or positive (== got lock), which allows
for the same value re-use for the non-recursive case, and you could
avoid the enum entirely.

                  Linus