[PATCH] bus: vexpress-config: fix device reference leak

[linux@armlinux.org.uk (Russell King - ARM Linux)]

On Fri, Nov 04, 2016 at 11:42:26AM +0000, Pawel Moll wrote:
> On Tue, 2016-11-01 at 11:43 +0100, Johan Hovold wrote:
> > Make sure to drop the reference to the parent device taken by
> > class_find_device() after populating the bus.
> > 
> > Fixes: 3b9334ac835b ("mfd: vexpress: Convert custom func API to
> > regmap")
> > Signed-off-by: Johan Hovold <johan@kernel.org>
> 
> You're right. May I ask how did you figure it out? The get_device()
> happening in class_find_device() is a bit obscure,

It's not obscure at all - all the functions that find a device do so
under a lock to ensure that the device does not go away, and they
take a reference count on the device before returning the pointer for
exactly the same reason.

If they didn't do that, the find function could locate a struct device
while another thread is deleting the struct device, and it would then
return a stale pointer - and dereferencing that pointer would then be
a use-after-free bug.

So not obscure, but rather fundamentally necessary.

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