[PATCH RFC 0/4] Fixes for Marvell MII paged register access races

[Russell King - ARM Linux <linux@armlinux.org.uk>]

Hi,

While doing final testing of the mvneta changes for phylink, a very
easy to trigger race condition was found with the Marvell PHY driver
which manifested itself as the link going down when a hibernate cycle
terminates.

The issue turned out to be a race between two threads accessing the
PHY - one trying to do a status read and the other configuring the PHY.

The result is the configuration thread tries to read-modify-write a
paged register in a non-copper page, but the status read thread
switches the PHY back to the copper page half-way through.

Various solutions involving phy->lock were considered, but found to
create more lock dependency issues than were nice to deal with.

The solution proposed here uses the mdiobus lock to ensure that accesses
to paged registers become atomic with respect to all other bus accesses,
including those from userspace.

There is an open question whether there should be generic helpers for
this.  Generic helpers would mean:

- Additional couple of function pointers in phy_driver to read/write the
  paging register.  This has the restriction that there must only be one
  paging register.

- The helpers become more expensive, and because they're in a separate
  compilation unit, the compiler will be unable to optimise them by
  inlining the static functions.

- The helpers would be re-usable, saving replications of that code, and
  making it more likely for phy authors to safely access the PHY.

Another potential question is whether using the mdiobus lock (which
excludes all other MII bus access) is best - while it has the advantage
of also ensuring atomicity with userspace accesses, it means that no one
else can access an independent PHY on the same bus while a paged access
is on-going.  It feels like a big hammer, but I'm not convinced that we
will see a lot of contention on it.

Comments?

 drivers/net/phy/marvell.c  | 365 +++++++++++++++++++++------------------------
 drivers/net/phy/mdio_bus.c |  65 ++++++--
 drivers/net/phy/phy-core.c |  11 +-
 include/linux/mdio.h       |   3 +
 include/linux/phy.h        |  26 ++++
 5 files changed, 256 insertions(+), 214 deletions(-)

-- 
RMK's Patch system: http://www.armlinux.org.uk/developer/patches/
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