linux-kernel - Re: Race condition between driver_probe_device and device

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Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.44L0.1205241029260.1349-100000@iolanthe.rowland.org>
Date:	Thu, 24 May 2012 10:37:40 -0400 (EDT)
From:	Alan Stern <stern@...land.harvard.edu>
To:	Greg KH <gregkh@...uxfoundation.org>
cc:	Ming Lei <ming.lei@...onical.com>,
	"Eric W. Biederman" <ebiederm@...ssion.com>,
	Wedson Almeida Filho <wedsonaf@...il.com>,
	Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
	<linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
	Linux PM List <linux-pm@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: Race condition between driver_probe_device and device_shutdownā€¸

On Wed, 23 May 2012, Greg KH wrote:

> On Thu, May 24, 2012 at 09:39:46AM +0800, Ming Lei wrote:
> > On Wed, May 23, 2012 at 11:06 PM, Alan Stern <stern@...land.harvard.edu> wrote:
> > > On Wed, 23 May 2012, Ming Lei wrote:
> > >> The .shutdown callback pointer is got from device->driver, which is
> > >> changed in probe and release path. Also runtime PM thing has been
> > >> involved into shutting down recently, so looks not only hardware parts
> > >> are involved now.
> > >
> > > This is a tricky question.  Overall I think you're probably right.
> > >
> > > It's certainly true that holding the device lock across the shutdown
> > > callback is the easiest and most reliable way to prevent these races.
> > 
> > But holding device lock across .shutdown is very inefficient because
> > most of devices' driver have not shutdown callback, so I think it is better

The code there is racy already.  It does:

		} else if (dev->driver && dev->driver->shutdown) {

without any locking protection.  If the driver is unbound while this 
statement runs then dev->driver could be non-NULL for the first test 
and NULL for the second.

> > to fix the race by prevent driver core from probing or releasing once
> > shutdown is started.
> > 
> > How about the below patch?
> 
> How about waiting for the original poster to respond as to exactly how
> they are hitting this race before doing anything?

In addition, the patch is too complicated.  For this type of
synchronization you should use SRCU.  See
Documentation/RCU/whatisRCU.txt and related files.

Alan Stern

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