e spinlock as the one taken by the lock code and released only by the unlock routine. Combining this with (d) above, satisfies requirement (2). Overall, since we use a spinlock (mentioned in (a)) to prevent CPU hotplug operations from racing with br_write_lock-unlock, requirement (1) is also taken care of. By the way, it is to be noted that a CPU offline operation can actually run in parallel with our lock-unlock sequence, because our callback doesn't react to notifications earlier than CPU_DEAD (in order to maintain our bitmap properly). And this means, since we use our own bitmap (which is stale, on purpose) during the lock-unlock sequence, we could end up unlocking the per-cpu lock of an offline CPU (because we had locked it earlier, when the CPU was online), in order to satisfy requirement (2). But this is harmless, though it looks a bit awkward. Debugged-by: Cong Meng Signed-off-by: Srivatsa S. Bhat Signed-off-by: Al Viro Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org Ž