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Re: Support for i386 builds of glibc?
On Mon, 4 Mar 2013, David Miller wrote:
> > They could be easily emulated with the aid of global spinlocks, but
> > given the decline of the i386 it's probably not worth the effort.
>
> This is a misnomer, you can't use global spinlocks as those are not
> signal safe and will deadlock. Even the glibc testsuite will trigger
> such deadlocks.
I think "can't" is too strong a statement, signals are to userland what
interrupts are to the kernel. The whole critical section could run with
all signals blocked; if you wrote that the overhead might be prohibitive,
then I would agree though.
Maciej