[PATCH] Hold the device's parent's lock during probe and remove
This patch (as604) makes the driver core hold a device's parent's lock as well as the device's lock during calls to the probe and remove methods in a driver. This facility is needed by USB device drivers, owing to the peculiar way USB devices work: A device provides multiple interfaces, and drivers are bound to interfaces rather than to devices; Nevertheless a reset, reset-configuration, suspend, or resume affects the entire device and requires the caller to hold the lock for the device, not just a lock for one of the interfaces. Since a USB driver's probe method is always called with the interface lock held, the locking order rules (always lock parent before child) prevent these methods from acquiring the device lock. The solution provided here is to call all probe and remove methods, for all devices (not just USB), with the parent lock already acquired. Although currently only the USB subsystem requires these changes, people have mentioned in prior discussion that the overhead of acquiring an extra semaphore in all the prove/remove sequences is not overly large. Up to now, the USB core has been using its own set of private semaphores. A followup patch will remove them, relying entirely on the device semaphores provided by the driver core. The code paths affected by this patch are: device_add and device_del: The USB core already holds the parent lock, so no actual change is needed. driver_register and driver_unregister: The driver core will now lock both the parent and the device before probing or removing. driver_bind and driver_unbind (in sysfs): These routines will now lock both the parent and the device before binding or unbinding. bus_rescan_devices: The helper routine will lock the parent before probing a device. I have not tested this patch for conflicts with other subsystems. As far as I can see, the only possibility of conflict would lie in the bus_rescan_devices pathway, and it seems pretty remote. Nevertheless, it would be good for this to get a lot of testing in -mm. Signed-off-by: Alan Stern <stern@rowland.harvard.edu> Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@suse.de>
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