Chapter 5. Cheat Sheet For Locking
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# Chapter 5. Cheat Sheet For Locking

Pete Zaitcev gives the following summary:

- If you are in a process context (any syscall) and want to lock other process out, use a mutex. You can take a mutex and sleep (`copy_from_user*(` or `kmalloc(x,GFP_KERNEL)`).

- Otherwise (== data can be touched in an interrupt), use `spin_lock_irqsave()` and `spin_unlock_irqrestore()`.

- Avoid holding spinlock for more than 5 lines of code and across any function call (except accessors like `readb`).

## Table of Minimum Requirements

The following table lists the minimum locking requirements between various contexts. In some cases, the same context can only be running on one CPU at a time, so no locking is required for that context (eg. a particular thread can only run on one CPU at a time, but if it needs shares data with another thread, locking is required).

Remember the advice above: you can always use `spin_lock_irqsave()`, which is a superset of all other spinlock primitives.

Table 5.1. Table of Locking Requirements

| IRQ Handler A | IRQ Handler B | Softirq A | Softirq B | Tasklet A | Tasklet B | Timer A | Timer B | User Context A | User Context B
IRQ Handler A | None |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |
IRQ Handler B | SLIS | None |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |
Softirq A | SLI | SLI | SL |  |  |  |  |  |  |
Softirq B | SLI | SLI | SL | SL |  |  |  |  |  |
Tasklet A | SLI | SLI | SL | SL | None |  |  |  |  |
Tasklet B | SLI | SLI | SL | SL | SL | None |  |  |  |
Timer A | SLI | SLI | SL | SL | SL | SL | None |  |  |
Timer B | SLI | SLI | SL | SL | SL | SL | SL | None |  |
User Context A | SLI | SLI | SLBH | SLBH | SLBH | SLBH | SLBH | SLBH | None |
User Context B | SLI | SLI | SLBH | SLBH | SLBH | SLBH | SLBH | SLBH | MLI | None

Table 5.2. Legend for Locking Requirements Table

SLIS | spin_lock_irqsave
SLI | spin_lock_irq
SL | spin_lock
SLBH | spin_lock_bh
MLI | mutex_lock_interruptible

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