Re: [PATCH 2/3] gpiolib: use kref in gpio_desc

[Linus Walleij <linus.walleij@linaro.org>]

On Thu, Mar 12, 2020 at 7:25 PM Bartosz Golaszewski
<bgolaszewski@baylibre.com> wrote:

> I believe this is not correct. The resources managed by devres are
> released when the device is detached from a driver, not when the
> device's reference count goes to 0. When the latter happens, the
> device's specific (or its device_type's) release callback is called -
> for gpiolib this is gpiodevice_release().

Yeah you're right, I even point that out in my second letter :/

It's a bit of confusion for everyone (or it's just me).

> The kref inside struct device will not go down to zero until you call
> device_del() (if you previously called device_add() that is which
> increases the reference count by a couple points). But what I'm
> thinking about is making the call to device_del() depend not on the
> call to gpiochip_remove() but on the kref on the gpio device going
> down to zero. As for the protection against module removal - this
> should be handled by module_get/put().

Right. At the end of gpiochip_remove():

   cdev_device_del(&gdev->chrdev, &gdev->dev);
   put_device(&gdev->dev);

That last put_device() should in best case bring the refcount
to zero.

So the actual way we lifecycle GPIO chips is managed
resources using only devm_* but the reference count does work
too: reference count should normally land at zero since the
gpiochip_remove() call is ended with a call to
put_device() and that should (ideally) bring it to zero.

It's just that this doesn't really trigger anything.

I think there is no way out of the fact that we have to
forcefully remove the gpio_chip when devm_* destructors
kicks in: the driver is indeed getting removed at that
point.

In gpiochip_remove() we "numb" the chip so that any
gpio_desc:s currently in use will just fail silently and not crash,
since they are not backed by a driver any more. The descs
stay around until the consumer releases them, but if we probe the
same GPIO device again they will certainly not re-attach or
something.

Arguably it is a bit of policy. Would it make more sense to
have rmmod fail if the kref inside gdev->dev->kobj->kref
is != 1? I suppose that is what things like storage
drivers pretty much have to do.

The problem with that is that as soon as you have a consumer
that is compiled into the kernel it makes it impossible to
remove the gpio driver with rmmod.

I really needed to refresh this a bit, so the above is maybe
a bit therapeutic.

I don't really see how we could do things differently without
creating some other problem though.

Yours,
Linus Walleij