Re: refcounting drivers' data structures used in sysfs buffers

Oliver Neukum
2007-03-12T15:59:30Z

Am Montag, 12. März 2007 16:42 schrieb Dmitry Torokhov:
> On 3/12/07, Oliver Neukum <oneukum@suse.de> wrote:
> > Am Montag, 12. März 2007 15:57 schrieb Alan Stern
> > > No, you're missing the point. Let's say driver A's disconnect() is
> > > called, so the driver marks its private data structure as "disconnected"
> > > and does dev_set_drvdata(NULL). Then driver B is probed and bound to the
> > > device, and it does its own dev_set_drvdata(). Then a user still holding
> > > an open sysfs file reference for driver A calls a show() or store()
> > > method. The method will do dev_get_drvdata(), receiving the pointer to
> > > driver B's private data. Now you're in trouble, because A's method will
> > > think it owns B's private data!
> >
> > Yes, I was missing the point. In consequence, drivers must not use
> > dev_get_drvdata() to get their references to their private data. It's
> > probably necessary to store it in struct sysfs_buffer and include that
> > in the store/show callbacks.
> > (The same does apply to interfaces of course)
> >
>
> Or drivers coudl verify that they still bound to the device they are
> about to operate on (psmouse does this by taking a lock on device and
> then checking if driver bound is the same address as psmouse). But I'd
> rather get rid of all this clutter if we could sever sysfs access
> after removing corresponding attributes.

No, the call has to fail if the driver is rebound to the device.

Regards
Oliver