with a new implementation that has a mostly reentrant "addchar"
routine, supports multiple message buffers in the kernel, and hides
the implementation details from callers.
The new code uses a kind of sequence number to represend the current
read and write positions in the buffer. This approach (suggested
mainly by bde) permits the read and write pointers to be maintained
separately, which reduces the number of atomic operations that are
required. The "mostly reentrant" above refers to the way that while
it is now always safe to have any number of concurrent writers,
readers could see the message buffer after a writer has advanced
the pointers but before it has witten the new character.
Discussed on: freebsd-arch
6bb0e5cb46