[PATCH 3/3] serial: Check result of console_unregister()

[Sascha Hauer]

Hi Andrey,

On Mon, Apr 09, 2018 at 09:00:52AM -0700, Andrey Smirnov wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 3, 2018 at 12:04 AM, Sascha Hauer <s.hauer at pengutronix.de> wrote:
> > On Mon, Mar 26, 2018 at 06:09:15AM -0700, Andrey Smirnov wrote:
> >> In order to allow 'serdev' devices to prevent parent console device
> >> removal and correspondign memory deallocation add code to all serial
> >> driver to check result of console_unregister() and bail out early if
> >> it is unsuccessful.
> >>
> >> One example of a use-case for this would be a reset handler relying on
> >> a serdev device for transport. Without this patch underlying console
> >> device would be removed and de-allocated before reset handler is even
> >> run thus leading to unpredictable behaviour and crashes.
> >
> > Can't we make this sure at driver core level?
> 
> I need to be able to prevent serial driver's "remove" function from
> ever executing to prevent any de-initialization/memory freeing from
> happening. The simplest way to solve this in driver core that comes to
> my mind is implementing simple reference counting API that children
> could use to force driver core to bail out on removing parents if they
> are still in use. Does that sound like a reasonable idea?
> 
> > So if a device decides not
> > to return -EBUSY in the remove callback then the parent devices won't be
> > removed?
> 
> Remove callback currently returns void, we could change it to return
> int and use it to implement a sort of implicit refcounting, but doing
> so would result in quite a bit of code churn since all of the current
> drivers would have to be converted to return int in their .remove
> callbacks. Would you rather I do this or explicit refcounting?

Normally it helps looking at the Linux kernel to see how a problem is
solved there. Not so this time it seems. Linux distinguishes between
"remove" and "shutdown". "shutdown" is what we want during barebox
shutdown. I found a Linux driver that is similar to your situation: It
registers a restart_handler while being a i2c device itself. There seems
to be no way to prevent a device from being shutdown, it's only that the
i2c bus drivers simply do not implement it.

Where do we go from here? I think reference counting is a bit over the
top.

At the moment I would opt for a *very* simple solution: Let's drop the
call to console_unregister() and the freeing of resources entirely as
it gives us nothing. The only console driver I can see where removing
is valid is drivers/usb/gadget/u_serial.c and you won't use this for
restarting a SoC ;)

Sascha

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