On Fri, Apr 3, 2020 at 3:58 PM Daniel Vetter daniel.vetter@ffwll.ch wrote:
In drm we've added nice drm_device (the main gpu driver thing, which also represents the userspace interfaces and has everything else dangling off it) init functions using devres, devm_drm_dev_init and soon devm_drm_dev_alloc (this patch series adds that).
A slight trouble is that drm_device itself holds a reference on the struct device it's sitting on top (for sysfs links and dmesg debug and lots of other things), so there's a reference loop. For real drivers this is broken at remove/unplug time, where all devres resources are released device_release_driver(), before the final device reference is dropped. So far so good.
There's 2 exceptions:
drm/vkms|vgem: Virtual drivers for which we create a fake/virtual platform device to make them look more like normal devices to userspace. These aren't drivers in the driver model sense, we simple create a platform_device and register it.
drm/i915/selftests, where we create minimal mock devices, and again the selftests aren't proper drivers in the driver model sense.
For these two cases the reference loop isn't broken, because devres is only cleaned up when the last device reference is dropped. But that's not happening, because the drm_device holds that last struct device reference.
Thus far this wasn't a problem since the above cases simply hand-rolled their cleanup code. But I want to convert all drivers over to the devm_ versions, hence it would be really nice if these virtual/fake/mock uses-cases could also be managed with devres cleanup.
I see three possible approaches:
Restarting this at the top level, because the discussion thus far just ended in a long "you're doing it wrong", despite that I think we're doing what v4l is doing (plus/minus that we can't do an exact matching handling in drm because our uapi has a lot more warts, which we can't change because no breaking userspace).
So which one of the three below is the right approach?
Aside, looking at the v4l solution I think there's also a confusion about struct device representing a char device (which v4l directly uses as its userspace interface refcounted thing, and which drm does _not_ directly). And a struct device embedded into something like platform_device or a virtual device, where a driver can bind to. My question here is about the former, I don't care how cdev struct device are cleaned up one bit. Now if other subsystems relies on the devres cleanup behaviour we currently have because of such cdev usage, then yeah first approach doesn't work (and I have a big surprised that use case, but hey would actually learn something).
End of aside, since again I want to figure out which of the tree approaches it the right one. Not about how wrong one of them is, ignoring the other three I laid out. And maybe there's even more options for this. -Daniel
Clean up devres from device_del (or platform_device_unregister) even when no driver is bound. This seems like the simplest solution, but also the one with the widest impact, and what this patch implements. We might want to include more of the cleanup than just devres_release_all, but this is all I need to get my use case going.
Create a devres group and release that when we unbind. The code in virtual drivers gets a bit ugly, since every error case has a different cleanup code until we've chained everything (platform_device, devres group and then drm_device) together and a devres_release_group takes care of everything. Doable, but a bit confusing when I typed it out.
Convert the virtual drivers to real (in the device model sense) drivers. Feels like too much boilerplate for not much gain. And especially with the mock objects minimal mocking is kinda the goal, to limit the amount of accidentally pulled in code into our unit tests as much as possible.
Either way I think time to discuss this a bit and figure out what's the recommended approach here.
Signed-off-by: Daniel Vetter daniel.vetter@intel.com Cc: Greg Kroah-Hartman gregkh@linuxfoundation.org Cc: "Rafael J. Wysocki" rafael@kernel.org
drivers/base/dd.c | 2 ++ 1 file changed, 2 insertions(+)
diff --git a/drivers/base/dd.c b/drivers/base/dd.c index b25bcab2a26b..1bcfb0ff5f44 100644 --- a/drivers/base/dd.c +++ b/drivers/base/dd.c @@ -1155,6 +1155,8 @@ static void __device_release_driver(struct device *dev, struct device *parent) dev);
kobject_uevent(&dev->kobj, KOBJ_UNBIND);
} else {devres_release_all(dev); }}
-- 2.25.1