Re: [PATCH v3 00/24] gpio: rework locking and object life-time control

[Andy Shevchenko <andriy.shevchenko@linux.intel.com>]

On Thu, Feb 08, 2024 at 10:58:56AM +0100, Bartosz Golaszewski wrote:
> From: Bartosz Golaszewski <bartosz.golaszewski@linaro.org>
> 
> This is a big rework of locking in GPIOLIB. The current serialization is
> pretty much useless. There is one big spinlock (gpio_lock) that "protects"
> both the GPIO device list, GPIO descriptor access and who knows what else.
> 
> I'm putting "protects" in quotes as in several places the lock is
> taken, released whenever a sleeping function is called and re-taken
> without regards for the "protected" state that may have changed.
> 
> First a little background on what we're dealing with in GPIOLIB. We have
> consumer API functions that can be called from any context explicitly
> (get/set value, set direction) as well as many others which will get
> called in atomic context implicitly (e.g. set config called in certain
> situations from gpiod_direction_output()).
> 
> On the other side: we have GPIO provider drivers whose callbacks may or
> may not sleep depending on the underlying protocol.
> 
> This makes any attempts at serialization quite complex. We typically
> cannot use sleeping locks - we may be called from atomic - but we also
> often cannot use spinlocks - provider callbacks may sleep. Moreover: we
> have close ties with the interrupt and pinctrl subsystems, often either
> calling into them or getting called from them. They use their own locking
> schemes which are at odds with ours (pinctrl uses mutexes, the interrupt
> subsystem can call GPIO helpers with spinlock taken).
> 
> There is also another significant issue: the GPIO device object contains
> a pointer to gpio_chip which is the implementation of the GPIO provider.
> This object can be removed at any point - as GPIOLIB officially supports
> hotplugging with all the dynamic expanders that we provide drivers for -
> and leave the GPIO API callbacks with a suddenly NULL pointer. This is
> a problem that allowed user-space processes to easily crash the kernel
> until we patched it with a read-write semaphore in the user-space facing
> code (but the problem still exists for in-kernel users). This was
> recognized before as evidenced by the implementation of validate_desc()
> but without proper serialization, simple checking for a NULL pointer is
> pointless and we do need a generic solution for that issue as well.
> 
> If we want to get it right - the more lockless we go, the better. This is
> why SRCU seems to be the right candidate for the mechanism to use. In fact
> it's the only mechanism we can use our read-only critical sections to be
> called from atomic and protecc contexts as well as call driver callbacks
> that may sleep (for the latter case).
> 
> We're going to use it in three places: to protect the global list of GPIO
> devices, to ensure consistency when dereferencing the chip pointer in GPIO
> device struct and finally to ensure that users can access GPIO descriptors
> and always see a consistent state.
> 
> We do NOT serialize all API callbacks. This means that provider callbacks
> may be called simultaneously and GPIO drivers need to provide their own
> locking if needed. This is on purpose. First: we only support exclusive
> GPIO usage* so there's no risk of two drivers getting in each other's way
> over the same GPIO. Second: with this series, we ensure enough consistency
> to limit the chance of drivers or user-space users crashing the kernel.
> With additional improvements in handling the flags field in GPIO
> descriptors there's very little to gain, while bitbanging drivers may care
> about the increased performance of going lockless.
> 
> This series brings in one somewhat significant functional change for
> in-kernel users, namely: GPIO API calls, for which the underlying GPIO
> chip is gone, will no longer return 0 and emit a log message but instead
> will return -ENODEV.
> 
> I know this is a lot of code to go through but the more eyes we get on it
> the better.
> 
> Thanks,
> Bartosz
> 
> * - This is not technically true. We do provide the
> GPIOD_FLAGS_BIT_NONEXCLUSIVE flag. However this is just another piece of
> technical debt. This is a hack provided for a single use-case in the
> regulator framework which got out of control and is now used in many
> places that should have never touched it. It's utterly broken and doesn't
> even provide any contract as to what a "shared GPIO" is. I would argue
> that it's the next thing we should address by providing "reference counted
> GPIO enable", not just a flag allowing to request the same GPIO twice
> and then allow two drivers to fight over who toggles it as is the case
> now. For now, let's just treat users of GPIOD_FLAGS_BIT_NONEXCLUSIVE like
> they're consciously and deliberately choosing to risk undefined behavior.

LGTM, but I haven't done thorough review, hence, FWIW,
Acked-by: Andy Shevchenko <andriy.shevchenko@linux.intel.com>


-- 
With Best Regards,
Andy Shevchenko