Re: [PATCH 2/2] module: add support to avoid duplicates early on load

Johan Hovold
2023-06-05T12:25:44Z

On Tue, May 30, 2023 at 11:40:35AM +0200, Johan Hovold wrote:
> On Mon, May 29, 2023 at 09:55:15PM -0400, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> > On Mon, May 29, 2023 at 11:18 AM Johan Hovold <johan@kernel.org> wrote:
> > >
> > > I took a closer look at some of the modules that failed to load and
> > > noticed a pattern in that they have dependencies that are needed by more
> > > than one device.
> >
> > Ok, this is a "maybe something like this" RFC series of two patches -
> > one trivial one to re-organize things a bit so that we can then do the
> > real one which uses a filter based on the inode pointer to return an
> > "idempotent return value" for module loads that share the same inode.
> >
> > It's entirely untested, and since I'm on the road I'm going to not
> > really be able to test it. It compiles for me, and the code looks
> > fairly straightforward, but it's probably buggy.
> >
> > It's very loosely based on Luis' attempt, but it
> > (a) is internal to module loading
> > (b) uses a reliable cookie
> > (c) doesn't leave the cookie around randomly for later
> > (d) has seen absolutely no testing
> >
> > Put another way: if somebody wants to play with this, please treat it
> > as a starting point, not the final thing. You might need to debug
> > things, and fix silly mistakes.
>
> With the missing spinlock initialisation fixed:
>
> -static struct spinlock idem_lock;
> +static DEFINE_SPINLOCK(idem_lock);
>
> this passes basic smoke testing and allows the X13s to boot.
>
> It does not seem to have any significant impact on boot time, but it
> avoids some of the unnecessary load attempts as intended:

Took another look at code which modulo some nits like missing spaces
around a + operator and an "ourselfs" typo looks good to me. So with the
spinlock initialisation fixed:

Reviewed-by: Johan Hovold <johan@kernel.org>
Tested-by: Johan Hovold <johan@kernel.org>

Johan