On architectures where the atomicity of the bit operations is handled by
external means (ie a separate spinlock to protect concurrent accesses),
just doing a direct assignment on the workqueue data field (as done by
commit 4594bf159f) can cause the
assignment to be lost due to lack of serialization with the bitops on
the same word.
So we need to serialize the assignment with the locks on those
architectures (notably older ARM chips, PA-RISC and sparc32).
So rather than using an "unsigned long", let's use "atomic_long_t",
which already has a safe assignment operation (atomic_long_set()) on
such architectures.
This requires that the atomic operations use the same atomicity locks as
the bit operations do, but that is largely the case anyway. Sparc32
will probably need fixing.
Architectures (including modern ARM with LL/SC) that implement sane
atomic operations for SMP won't see any of this matter.
Cc: Russell King <rmk+lkml@arm.linux.org.uk>
Cc: David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com>
Cc: David Miller <davem@davemloft.com>
Cc: Matthew Wilcox <matthew@wil.cx>
Cc: Linux Arch Maintainers <linux-arch@vger.kernel.org>
Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
a08727bae7