Re: [PATCH v8 2/5] drm/bridge: get the bridge returned by drm_bridge_chain_get_first_bridge()

[Luca Ceresoli <luca.ceresoli@bootlin.com>]

Hello Liu,

On Mon, 23 Jun 2025 10:56:13 +0800
Liu Ying <victor.liu@nxp.com> wrote:

> On 06/21/2025, Luca Ceresoli wrote:
> > drm_bridge_chain_get_first_bridge() returns a bridge pointer that the
> > caller could hold for a long time. Increment the refcount of the returned
> > bridge and document it must be put by the caller.  
> 
> To make sure the incremented refcount is decremented once this patch is
> applied, does it make sense to squash patch 3, 4 and 5 into this one?

I see there is a trade off here between bisectability and patch
readability.

However about bisectability the problem is limited for this series. To
get an actual get/put imbalance you'd have to be able to remove the
bridge, but removing (part of) the bridge chain is not at all supported
right now, and it won't be until after chapter 4 of this work (see
cover letter).

However I realize there is an issue if:
* patch 2 is applied but patches 3/4/5 are not
  (it does not make sense to apply this series partially, but this
  might happen when cherry-picking?)
* an entire DRM card is removed where
  drm_bridge_chain_get_first_bridge() is used by some components

If both happen we'd have a get without put, thus a missing free and a
memory leak for the container struct.

Note that, besides drm_bridge_chain_get_first_bridge() that this
series covers, there are various other accessors: see items 1.E.{2..8}
in cover letter. For some of those there are many more changes to apply
because they are called in more places. Squashing them would result in
a really large patch that is likely hard to review and manage.

So I'll leave the decision to DRM subsystem maintainers. For the time
being I'm keeping the current approach given that Maxime already
reviewed these patches in the past, not squashed.

Best regards,
Luca

-- 
Luca Ceresoli, Bootlin
Embedded Linux and Kernel engineering
https://bootlin.com