HEAD UP: non-MPSAFE network drivers to be disabled (was: 8.0 network stack MPsafety goals (fwd))

[John Baldwin]

On Sunday 29 June 2008 01:02:49 pm Robert Watson wrote:
> 
> On Sat, 24 May 2008, Robert Watson wrote:
> 
> > Just as a reminder, we've just about reached the one month date before 
> > IFF_NEEDSGIANT drivers are disabled in the build.  You can find a 
> > description of the general problem and list of specific drivers below.
> >
> > As USB work is on-going, I will *not* disable the USB drivers at this 
time, 
> > but all other drivers in the list below will be disabled on 26 June.  They 
> > will remain in the tree, easily accessible for patch distribution and 
> > re-enabling, until October, when any remaining non-MPSAFE drivers will be 
> > deleted in 8.x.  FreeBSD 8.0 will not ship with compatibility shims to 
> > support non-MPSAFE network device drivers.
> 
> An FYI on the state of things here: in the last month, John has updated a 
> number of device drivers to be MPSAFE, and the USB work remains in-flight. 
> I'm holding fire a bit on disabling IFF_NEEDSGIANT while things settle and I 
> catch up on driver state, and will likely send out an update next week 
> regarding which device drivers remain on the kill list, and generally what 
the 
> status of this project is.

Pending someone testing them real soon, I will be axeing at least sbsh, sbni, 
snc, and cnw this week (I had someone e-mail who said they would test the 
arl(4) pages).  I still want to work on if_plip (which means locking ppbus) 
and if_ic (iicbus).  I started working on locking iicbus recently FWIW.

Aside from USB that leaves ray(4) (which does tsleep() all over the place 
including in interrupt handlers.. this couldn't have worked on 4.x all that 
well) and the various Cronyx drivers which interface with netgraph.  Someone 
who knows netgraph can probably step up to lock those.  Could also ask rik@ 
directly about the Cronyx drivers (cx, ctau, and cp).

-- 
John Baldwin