• Roderick Colenbrander's avatar
    HID: uhid: fix timeout when probe races with IO · 67f8ecc5
    Roderick Colenbrander authored
    Many devices use userspace bluetooth stacks like BlueZ or Bluedroid in combination
    with uhid. If any of these stacks is used with a HID device for which the driver
    performs a HID request as part .probe (or technically another HID operation),
    this results in a deadlock situation. The deadlock results in a 5 second timeout
    for I/O operations in HID drivers, so isn't fatal, but none of the I/O operations
    have a chance of succeeding.
    
    The root cause for the problem is that uhid only allows for one request to be
    processed at a time per uhid instance and locks out other operations. This means
    that if a user space is creating a new HID device through 'UHID_CREATE', which
    ultimately triggers '.probe' through the HID layer. Then any HID request e.g. a
    read for calibration data would trigger a HID operation on uhid again, but it
    won't go out to userspace, because it is still stuck in UHID_CREATE.
    In addition bluetooth stacks are typically single threaded, so they wouldn't be
    able to handle any requests while waiting on uhid.
    
    Lucikly the UHID spec is somewhat flexible and allows for fixing the issue,
    without breaking user space. The idea which the patch implements as discussed
    with David Herrmann is to decouple adding of a hid device (which triggers .probe)
    from UHID_CREATE. The work will kick off roughly once UHID_CREATE completed (or
    else will wait a tiny bit of time in .probe for a lock). A HID driver has to call
    HID to call 'hid_hw_start()' as part of .probe once it is ready for I/O, which
    triggers UHID_START to user space. Any HID operations should function now within
    .probe and won't deadlock because userspace is stuck on UHID_CREATE.
    
    We verified this patch on Bluedroid with Android 6.0 and on desktop Linux with
    BlueZ stacks. Prior to the patch they had the deadlock issue.
    
    [jkosina@suse.cz: reword subject]
    Signed-off-by: default avatarRoderick Colenbrander <roderick.colenbrander@sony.com>
    Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org
    Signed-off-by: default avatarJiri Kosina <jkosina@suse.cz>
    67f8ecc5
uhid.c 17.7 KB