Re: [PATCH 1/1] More ethtool support for sis900

[Francois Romieu <romieu@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Daniele Venzano <webvenza@xxxxxxxxx> :
[...]
> I saw the locking, but I couldn't come up with a reason for it. Is it 
> needed because of kernel wide preemption ?

Usually you do not want simultaneous accesses to the mii interface
(link events, Tx timeout recovery or so).

From a quick glance at the sis900 driver, I would expect the lock to
protect against sis900_timer() (assuming you add a simple spinlock to
it as well).

--
Ueimor