Re: 2.6.30-rc6: Reported regressions from 2.6.29

Ingo Molnar
2009-05-17T06:33:28Z

* Kay Sievers <kay.sievers@vrfy.org> wrote:

> On Sun, 2009-05-17 at 02:15 +0200, Kay Sievers wrote:
> > On Sun, May 17, 2009 at 02:01, Linus Torvalds
> > <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> wrote:
> >
> > > [ 10.428691] Error: Driver 'rtc_cmos' is already registered, aborting...
> > >
> > > but the driver doesn't really care whether that succeeded or not, but then
> > > the platform_driver_probe fails (because the thing is already in use), so
> > > then it ends up unregistering something that never got registered in the
> > > first place.
> > >
> > > I think this is strictly speaking a bug in driver_unregister(), which is
> > > too fragile. If you unregister a drivert that wasn't registered, we
> > > shouldn't oops.
> > >
> > > But we could certainly do it at the rtc-cmos.c level too, and just not
> > > unregister it if the registration failed. My gut feel is that we should
> > > aim for the core driver helpers to be less fragile, though - we'll always
> > > have driver bugs.
> >
> > In:
> > driver_remove_file()
> > we try to access the private part:
> > sysfs_remove_file(&drv->p->kobj, ...
> > and that is NULL, for an unregistered driver, I would expect.
> >
> > I'm looking into it.
>
> This makes the oops in the driver-core, caused by the rtc driver
> unregister, go away. The original issue is also fixed in the rtc driver
> itself.
>
> Thanks,
> Kay
>
>
> From: Kay Sievers <kay.sievers@vrfy.org>
> Subject: Driver Core: do not oops when driver_unregister() is called for unregistered drivers
>
> Handle the case someone tries to unregister a non-registered driver
> more gracefully.
>
> Error: Driver 'rtc_cmos' is already registered, aborting...
> BUG: unable to handle kernel NULL pointer dereference at 00000018
> [<c01e16ba>] sysfs_remove_file+0x1/0xf
>
> Cc: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@suse.de>
> Signed-off-by: Kay Sievers <kay.sievers@vrfy.org>

please also put in a proper Reported-by.

> ---
>
> driver.c | 2 ++
> 1 file changed, 2 insertions(+)
>
> --- a/drivers/base/driver.c
> +++ b/drivers/base/driver.c
> @@ -257,6 +257,8 @@ EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL(driver_register);
> */
> void driver_unregister(struct device_driver *drv)
> {
> + if (!drv || !drv->p)
> + return;

I think it would be reasonable to also emit a:

WARN_ONCE(1, "unexpected driver unregister!\n");

here - as long as all such cases are a bug. As the imbalance (and a
bug) is really at the rtc-cmos driver level too and we should not
condone such pattern, silently.

( Not crashing in the driver core when we can avoid it is nice to
have too, of course. )

Ingo