of Giant during the Giant unwinding phase, and start work on instrumenting
Giant for the file and proc mutexes.
These wrappers allow developers to turn on and off Giant around various
subsystems. DEVELOPERS SHOULD NEVER TURN OFF GIANT AROUND A SUBSYSTEM JUST
BECAUSE THE SYSCTL EXISTS! General developers should only considering
turning on Giant for a subsystem whos default is off (to help track down
bugs). Only developers working on particular subsystems who know what
they are doing should consider turning off Giant.
These wrappers will greatly improve our ability to unwind Giant and test
the kernel on a (mostly) subsystem by subsystem basis. They allow Giant
unwinding developers (GUDs) to emplace appropriate subsystem and structural
mutexes in the main tree and then request that the larger community test
the work by turning off Giant around the subsystem(s), without the larger
community having to mess around with patches. These wrappers also allow
GUDs to boot into a (more likely to be) working system in the midst of
their unwinding work and to test that work under more controlled
circumstances.
There is a master sysctl, kern.giant.all, which defaults to 0 (off). If
turned on it overrides *ALL* other kern.giant sysctls and forces Giant to
be turned on for all wrapped subsystems. If turned off then Giant around
individual subsystems are controlled by various other kern.giant.XXX sysctls.
Code which overlaps multiple subsystems must have all related subsystem Giant
sysctls turned off in order to run without Giant.
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