From: Matthew Wilcox Lockdep warns about the mdio_lock taken with interrupts enabled then later taken from interrupt context. Initially, I considered changing these to spin_lock_irq/spin_unlock_irq, but then I looked at atl1e_phy_init() and saw that it calls msleep(). Sleeping while holding a spinlock is not allowed either. In the probe path, we haven't registered the interrupt handler, so it can't poke at this card yet. It's before we call register_netdev(), so I don't think any other threads can reach this card either. If I'm right, we don't need a spinlock at all. Signed-off-by: Matthew Wilcox Acked-by: Jie Yang Cc: Jeff Garzik Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton --- drivers/net/atl1e/atl1e_main.c | 2 -- 1 file changed, 2 deletions(-) diff -puN drivers/net/atl1e/atl1e_main.c~drivers-net-atl1e-dont-take-the-mdio_lock-in-atl1e_probe drivers/net/atl1e/atl1e_main.c --- a/drivers/net/atl1e/atl1e_main.c~drivers-net-atl1e-dont-take-the-mdio_lock-in-atl1e_probe +++ a/drivers/net/atl1e/atl1e_main.c @@ -2390,9 +2390,7 @@ static int __devinit atl1e_probe(struct } /* Init GPHY as early as possible due to power saving issue */ - spin_lock(&adapter->mdio_lock); atl1e_phy_init(&adapter->hw); - spin_unlock(&adapter->mdio_lock); /* reset the controller to * put the device in a known good starting state */ err = atl1e_reset_hw(&adapter->hw); _