Re: Driver bind/unbind and __devinit

[Greg KH <gregkh@suse.de>]

On Thu, Dec 08, 2005 at 05:22:12PM -0500, Dmitry Torokhov wrote:
> On 12/8/05, Greg KH <gregkh@suse.de> wrote:
> > On Thu, Dec 08, 2005 at 04:14:58PM -0500, Dmitry Torokhov wrote:
> > > Hi,
> > >
> > > Many drivers have their probe routines declared as __devinit which is
> > > a no-op unless CONFIG_HOTPLUG is set. However driver's bind/unbind
> > > attributes are created unconditionally, as fas as I can see. Would not
> > > it cause an oops if someone tries to use these attributes with
> > > CONFIG_HOTPLUG=N? Am I missing something?
> >
> > You are missing the CONFIG_HOTPLUG checks around the functions that add
> > and check the device ids from these sysfs files.  If CONFIG_HOTPLUG is
> > not enabled, those files do not do anything.
> >
> 
> I am slow today... I don't see any dependencies on CONFIG_HOTPLUG in
> drivers/base... Or you talking about one particular subsystem that
> handles this correctly?

Ugh, very sorry about that, I was thinking of the USB and PCI new_id
stuff.  You are right.

Yes, bind happening after the __init data section is thrown away, if
CONFIG_HOTPLUG is not enabled would be a bad thing.  But unbind can
stay.  I'll go make up a patch for that.

> > > Also, unbind implementation does not seem safe - we check the driver
> > > before taking device's semaphore so we risk unbinding wrong driver (in
> > > the unlikely event that we manage to unbind and bind another driver in
> > > another thread).
> >
> > Do you have a suggestion as to how to fix this?
> >
> 
> I think we could take the semaphore before checking driver and then
> use __device_release_driver(). But we'd need to make it global or move
> bind/unbind code into drivers/base/dd.c

I don't have a problem moving the code if it makes it easier.  Have a
patch?  :)

thanks,

greg k-h