Talk:Giant lock

Latest comment: 7 years ago by Guy Harris in topic On systems other than Linux?

Versions of major distros that stopped using the BKL edit

In this edit I put "Linux distributions at or above CentOS 7, Debian 7 (Wheezy) and Ubuntu 11.10 are therefore not using BKL". This is a direct consequence of the (sourced) 2011 removal in kernel version 2.6.39; the appropriate distro version numbers are merely copied from the wiki-linked pages CentOS, Debian version history and Ubuntu version history (I took the smallest version number whose kernel was above 2.6.39, and listed it here for quick reference). I'd have thought this is WP:CALC, so why would it need a source? Wouldn't clicking through to CentOS, Debian version history and Ubuntu version history and checking the sources there be sufficient? (if those pages are inadequately sourced then somebody needs to address it there.) Wikipedia's "List of..." articles don't need sources to justify an article's being on the list; isn't this the same thing? Silas S. Brown (email, talk) 15:24, 31 October 2016 (UTC)Reply

On systems other than Linux? edit

The article contains no information on how this affects other systems than Linux. Such as Windows, FreeBSD, etc. -- Frap (talk) 13:15, 3 February 2017 (UTC)Reply

Windows might never have had a giant lock. "Windows OT" (3.1, 95, 98, Me) didn't support multiprocessor systems, as far as I know. Windows NT may have had fine-grained locking all the way back to NT 3.1. As such, this may not have affected Windows.
For FreeBSD, if somebody wants to discuss the SMPng project here, they could add information based on, for example, "The locking infrastructure in the FreeBSD kernel". Similar stuff could be added for other OSes that started out using a giant lock and later replaced it with finer-grained locking. Guy Harris (talk) 17:40, 3 February 2017 (UTC)Reply