Re: [PATCH v16 07/14] counter: Add character device interface

From: William Breathitt Gray <vilhelm.gray@gmail.com>
To: Jonathan Cameron <jic23@kernel.org>
Cc: linux-stm32@st-md-mailman.stormreply.com, kernel@pengutronix.de,
	a.fatoum@pengutronix.de, kamel.bouhara@bootlin.com,
	gwendal@chromium.org, alexandre.belloni@bootlin.com,
	david@lechnology.com, linux-iio@vger.kernel.org,
	linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org,
	linux-arm-kernel@lists.infradead.org, syednwaris@gmail.com,
	patrick.havelange@essensium.com, fabrice.gasnier@st.com,
	mcoquelin.stm32@gmail.com, alexandre.torgue@st.com,
	o.rempel@pengutronix.de, jarkko.nikula@linux.intel.com,
	Dan Carpenter <dan.carpenter@oracle.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH v16 07/14] counter: Add character device interface
Date: Mon, 27 Sep 2021 19:21:17 +0900	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <YVGbHQnpBTQYm/7/@shinobu> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20210926161542.5cf99b58@jic23-huawei>

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On Sun, Sep 26, 2021 at 04:15:42PM +0100, Jonathan Cameron wrote:
> On Mon, 20 Sep 2021 19:09:13 +0900
> William Breathitt Gray <vilhelm.gray@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > On Sun, Sep 12, 2021 at 05:18:42PM +0100, Jonathan Cameron wrote:
> > > On Fri, 27 Aug 2021 12:47:51 +0900
> > > William Breathitt Gray <vilhelm.gray@gmail.com> wrote:
> > >   
> > > > This patch introduces a character device interface for the Counter
> > > > subsystem. Device data is exposed through standard character device read
> > > > operations. Device data is gathered when a Counter event is pushed by
> > > > the respective Counter device driver. Configuration is handled via ioctl
> > > > operations on the respective Counter character device node.
> > > > 
> > > > Cc: David Lechner <david@lechnology.com>
> > > > Cc: Gwendal Grignou <gwendal@chromium.org>
> > > > Cc: Dan Carpenter <dan.carpenter@oracle.com>
> > > > Cc: Oleksij Rempel <o.rempel@pengutronix.de>
> > > > Signed-off-by: William Breathitt Gray <vilhelm.gray@gmail.com>  
> > > 
> > > Hi William,
> > > 
> > > Why the bit based lock?  It feels like a mutex_trylock() type approach or
> > > spinlock_trylock() would be a more common solution to this problem.
> > > There is precedence for doing what you have here though so I'm not that
> > > worried about it.  
> > 
> > Hi Jonathan,
> > 
> > We originally used a mutex for this, but Jarkko discovered that this
> > produced a warning because chrdev_lock would be held when returning to
> > user space:
> > https://lore.kernel.org/linux-arm-kernel/YOq19zTsOzKA8v7c@shinobu/T/#m6072133d418d598a5f368bb942c945e46cfab9a5
> > 
> > Following David Lechner's suggestion, I decided to reimplement
> > chrdev_lock as a bitmap using an atomic flag.
> 
> Ok.  I'm not sure bit lock was quite what was intended (as there is only one of them)
> but I suppose it doesn't greatly matter.

It didn't cross my mind before, but would declaring chrdev_lock as an
atomic_t be a more appropriate solution here because we have only one
flag?

William Breathitt Gray

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