Re: [PATCH 4/5] driver core: inhibit automatic driver binding on reserved devices

Zev Weiss
2021-10-22T16:27:50Z

On Fri, Oct 22, 2021 at 01:57:21AM PDT, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
>On Fri, Oct 22, 2021 at 01:32:32AM -0700, Zev Weiss wrote:
>> On Thu, Oct 21, 2021 at 11:46:56PM PDT, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
>> > On Thu, Oct 21, 2021 at 07:00:31PM -0700, Zev Weiss wrote:
>> > > Devices whose fwnodes are marked as reserved are instantiated, but
>> > > will not have a driver bound to them unless userspace explicitly
>> > > requests it by writing to a 'bind' sysfs file. This is to enable
>> > > devices that may require special (userspace-mediated) preparation
>> > > before a driver can safely probe them.
>> > >
>> > > Signed-off-by: Zev Weiss <zev@bewilderbeest.net>
>> > > ---
>> > > drivers/base/bus.c | 2 +-
>> > > drivers/base/dd.c | 13 ++++++++-----
>> > > drivers/dma/idxd/compat.c | 3 +--
>> > > drivers/vfio/mdev/mdev_core.c | 2 +-
>> > > include/linux/device.h | 14 +++++++++++++-
>> > > 5 files changed, 24 insertions(+), 10 deletions(-)
>> >
>> > Ugh, no, I don't really want to add yet-another-state to the driver core
>> > like this. Why are these devices even in the kernel with a driver that
>> > wants to bind to them registered if the driver somehow should NOT be
>> > bound to it? Shouldn't all of that logic be in the crazy driver itself
>> > as that is a very rare and odd thing to do that the driver core should
>> > not care about at all.
>> >
>> > And why does a device need userspace interaction at all? Again, why
>> > would the driver not know about this and handle it all directly?
>> >
>>
>> Let me expand a bit more on the details of the specific situation I'm
>> dealing with...
>>
>> On a server motherboard we've got a host CPU (Xeon, Epyc, POWER, etc.) and a
>> baseboard management controller, or BMC (typically an ARM SoC, an ASPEED
>> AST2500 in my case). The host CPU's firmware (BIOS/UEFI, ME firmware, etc.)
>> lives in a SPI flash chip. Because it's the host's firmware, that flash
>> chip is connected to and generally (by default) under the control of the
>> host CPU.
>>
>> But we also want the BMC to be able to perform out-of-band updates to the
>> host's firmware, so the flash is *also* connected to the BMC. There's an
>> external mux (controlled by a GPIO output driven by the BMC) that switches
>> which processor (host or BMC) is actually driving the SPI signals to the
>> flash chip, but there's a bunch of other stuff that's also required before
>> the BMC can flip that switch and take control of the SPI interface:
>>
>> - the BMC needs to track (and potentially alter) the host's power state
>> to ensure it's not running (in OpenBMC the existing logic for this is an
>> entire non-trivial userspace daemon unto itself)
>>
>> - it needs to twiddle some other GPIOs to put the ME into recovery mode
>>
>> - it needs to exchange some IPMI messages with the ME to confirm it got
>> into recovery mode
>>
>> (Some of the details here are specific to the particular motherboard I'm
>> working with, but I'd guess other systems probably have broadly similar
>> requirements.)
>>
>> The firmware flash (or at least the BMC's side of the mux in front of it) is
>> attached to a spi-nor controller that's well supported by an existing MTD
>> driver (aspeed-smc), but that driver can't safely probe the chip until all
>> the stuff described above has been done. In particular, this means we can't
>> reasonably bind the driver to that device during the normal
>> device-discovery/driver-binding done in the BMC's boot process (nor do we
>> want to, as that would pull the rug out from under the running host). We
>> basically only ever want to touch that SPI interface when a user (sysadmin
>> using the BMC, let's say) has explicitly initiated an out-of-band firmware
>> update.
>>
>> So we want the kernel to be aware of the device's existence (so that we
>> *can* bind a driver to it when needed), but we don't want it touching the
>> device unless we really ask for it.
>>
>> Does that help clarify the motivation for wanting this functionality?
>
>Sure, then just do this type of thing in the driver itself. Do not have
>any matching "ids" for this hardware it so that the bus will never call
>the probe function for this hardware _until_ a manual write happens to
>the driver's "bind" sysfs file.
>

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding what you're suggesting, but if I just
change the DT "compatible" string so that the device doesn't match the
driver and then try to manually bind it, the driver_match_device() check
in bind_store() prevents that manual bind from actually happening.

Thanks,
Zev