[xfs-masters] RFC: Fix f_flags races without the BKL

[Christoph Hellwig]

On Tue, Dec 30, 2008 at 05:59:56AM -0700, Jonathan Corbet wrote:
> On Mon, 29 Dec 2008 16:27:32 +0100
> Andi Kleen <andi at firstfloor.org> wrote:
> 
> > I would prefer O_LOCK_FLAGS bit too. The global lock is not very nice
> > and I don't doubt someone will come up with a workload which
> > pounds on it.
> 
> Seems hard to imagine that it would be worse than the longstanding BKL
> situation.  That said, the global lock is clearly an unsubtle approach,
> and people don't like it.  I'd hoped to slip something quick through
> the merge window, but that seems unlikely, especially, since I'm
> allegedly on vacation.  I'll forget this patch for now and revisit it
> next week.

The global lock is an improvement over the current situation, so given
that we don't have any better counter-proposals we should put it in for
2.6.29.