I wrote code that works. I didn't test it, but the discussion is closed. It might have syntactic problems, but it does work. Better than any kernel extension ever would. End of story.

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I'm inclined to mark loopback DANGEROUS because there apparently still isn't a maintainer for it. And the next person who suggests using it instead of a real filesystem (ramfs, cramfs, JFFS) should be forced to actually make it work right first!

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So it may actually be that we can honestly claim that the half-fix is actually a proper fix. I would have to look a lot closer at the issue to be able to guarantee this, though. Comments? Anybody?

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We can add a comment to the Makefile. That's trivial.

What's not trivial, and what I WANT DONE is to make sure that when somebody wants to maintain link ordering, he can do so in an easy and obvious way. Not with Yet Another Hack.

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Now, the above won't work for drivers/net, but I think it will work for just about anything else. So let's just leave drivers/net alone for now. Simplicity is good.

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Anybody want to try out something like the above? (And no, I'm not applying it to my tree yet. It needs about a hundred pairs of eyes to verify that there isn't some subtle "lost wakeup" race somewhere).

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Can other people try the test-program and see if we have a pattern (ie "it happens only on Athlons", or "Linus is on drugs and it happens for everybody else").

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Did I mention my belief in the true meaning of "intelligence"?

"Intelligence is the ability to avoid doing work, yet get the work done".

Lazy programmers are the best programmers. Think Tom Sawyer painting the fence. That's intelligence.

Requiring almost no effort is a big plus in my book.

It's the "clever" programmer I'm afraid of. The one who isn't afraid of generating complexity, because he has a Plan (capital "P"), and he knows he can work out the details later.

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It's entirely untested, but it looks good and compiles. Ship it!

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