When an RCU-protected pointer is fetched but never dereferenced
rcu_access_pointer() should be used in place of rcu_dereference().
This commit explicitly records this very fact in Documentation/
RCU/rcu_dereference.txt, in order to prevent the usage of
rcu_dereference() in comparisons.
Signed-off-by: Michalis Kokologiannakis <mixaskok@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
This commit provides another caveat for the care and feeding of pointers
returned by rcu_dereference() that was pointed out in discussions within
the C++ standards committee.
Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Reviewed-by: Mathieu Desnoyers <mathieu.desnoyers@efficios.com>
Recent LKML discussings (see http://lwn.net/Articles/586838/ and
http://lwn.net/Articles/588300/ for the LWN writeups) brought out
some ways of misusing the return value from rcu_dereference() that
are not necessarily completely intuitive. This commit therefore
documents what can and cannot safely be done with these values.
Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Reviewed-by: Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org>
Michalis Kokologiannakis