Re: [PATCH] arm_pmu: acpi: fix reference leak on failed device registration

Johan Hovold
2026-04-16T07:23:35Z

On Thu, Apr 16, 2026 at 06:40:55AM +0200, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 15, 2026 at 07:19:06PM +0100, Mark Rutland wrote:

> > AFAICT you're saying that the reference was taken *within*
> > platform_device_register(), and then platform_device_register() itself
> > has failed. I think it's surprising that platform_device_register()
> > doesn't clean that up itself in the case of an error.
> >
> > There are *tonnes* of calls to platform_device_register() throughout the
> > kernel that don't even bother to check the return value, and many that
> > just pass the return onto a caller that can't possibly know to call
> > platform_device_put().
> >
> > Code in the same file as platform_device_register() expects it to clean up
> > after itself, e.g.
> >
> > | int platform_add_devices(struct platform_device **devs, int num)
> > | {
> > | int i, ret = 0;
> > |
> > | for (i = 0; i < num; i++) {
> > | ret = platform_device_register(devs[i]);
> > | if (ret) {
> > | while (--i >= 0)
> > | platform_device_unregister(devs[i]);
> > | break;
> > | }
> > | }
> > |
> > | return ret;
> > | }
> >
> > That's been there since the initial git commit, and back then,
> > platform_device_register() didn't mention that callers needed to perform
> > any cleanup.
> >
> > I see a comment was added to platform_device_register() in commit:
> >
> > 67e532a42cf4 ("driver core: platform: document registration-failure requirement")
> >
> > ... and that copied the commend added for device_register() in commit:
> >
> > 5739411acbaa ("Driver core: Clarify device cleanup.")
> >
> > ... but the potential brokenness is so widespread, and the behaviour is
> > so surprising, that I'd argue the real but is that device_register()
> > doesn't clean up in case of error. I don't think it's worth changing
> > this single instance given the prevalance and churn fixing all of that
> > would involve.
> >
> > I think it would be far better to fix the core driver API such that when
> > those functions return an error, they've already cleaned up for
> > themselves.
> >
> > Greg, am I missing some functional reason why we can't rework
> > device_register() and friends to handle cleanup themselves? I appreciate
> > that'll involve churn for some callers, but AFAICT the majority of
> > callers don't have the required cleanup.
>
> Yes, we should fix the platform core code here, this should not be
> required to do everywhere as obviously we all got it wrong.

It's not just the platform code as this directly reflects the behaviour
of device_register() as Mark pointed out.

It is indeed an unfortunate quirk of the driver model, but one can argue
that having a registration function that frees its argument on errors
would be even worse. And even more so when many (or most) users get this
right.

So if we want to change this, I think we would need to deprecate
device_register() in favour of explicit device_initialize() and
device_add().

That said, most users of platform_device_register() appear to operate
on static platform devices which don't even have a release function and
would trigger a WARN() if we ever drop the reference (which is arguably
worse than leaking a tiny bit of memory).

So leaving things as-is is also an option.

Johan