On Tue, 22 Nov 2022, Thomas Gleixner wrote:

Tearing down timers which have circular dependencies to other
functionality, e.g. workqueues, where the timer can schedule work and work
can arm timers is not trivial.

In those cases it is desired to shutdown the timer in a way which prevents
rearming of the timer. The mechanism to do so it to set timer->function to
NULL and use this as an indicator for the timer arming functions to ignore
the (re)arm request.

In preparation for that replace the warnings in the relevant code pathes
with checks for timer->function == NULL and discard the rearm request
silently.

Add debug_assert_init() instead of the WARN_ON_ONCE(!timer->function)
checks so that debug objects can warn about non-initialized timers.

Could you expand this paragraph, so that is is not missleading when a
reader is not aware of the details of debug objects? Otherwise it seems to
the reader that debug objects will warn when timer->function == NULL.

  The warning of debug objects does not cover the original
  WARN_ON_ONCE(!timer->function). It warns when timer was not initialized
  using timer_setup[_on_stack]() or via DEFINE_TIMER().

If developers fail to enable debug objects and then waste lots of time to
figure out why their non-initialized timer is not firing, they deserve it.

Thanks,

	Anna-Maria