[PATCH 0/9] Support for block device NVMEM providers

[Loic Poulain]

Hi Andrew,

On Wed, Apr 29, 2026 at 3:06 AM Andrew Lunn <andrew at lunn.ch> wrote:
>
> > Note that this is currently limited to eMMC-backed block devices, as
> > only the eMMC core associates a firmware node with the block device
> > (add_disk_fwnode). This can be easily extended in the future to
> > support additional block drivers.
>
> Would this be
>
> https://elixir.bootlin.com/linux/v7.0.1/source/drivers/mmc/core/block.c#L2641
>
> Looking at that function, mmc_blk_alloc_req() i don't see it doing
> anything different between an eMMC and MMC.

Yes, that’s correct, in the previous sentence I should have referred
to MMC-backed storage rather than specifically eMMC, since the MMC
scope also includes removable MMC/SD cards. That said, eMMC is more
likely to be used as an NVMEM area.

>
> An eMMC you don't expect to go away, since it is soldered
> down. However an MMC can be ejected. Is the code prepared for that?

I was about to say this wouldn’t be an issue, since the NVMEM device
would be unregistered along with the MMC card removal. However,
looking at nvmem_unregister(), it simply performs a kref_put(). This
means that if a consumer still holds a reference, e.g. through an
nvmem_cell, it might still be able to access the NVMEM reg_read
callback after the NVMEM device has been unregistered and the
NVMEM provider data (bnv) has been freed...

I guess I need to try and dig into this but at first glance it seems to be a
general NVMEM issue, since even though most NVMEM providers are
not hard-removable, there is nothing that fundamentally prevents them
from being logically removed/unbound at runtime.

Regards,
Loic