Re: [PATCH] PM: Acquire device locks on suspend

On Monday, 7 of January 2008, Alan Stern wrote:

On Mon, 7 Jan 2008, Rafael J. Wysocki wrote:

quoted

Please see the patch at: http://lkml.org/lkml/2008/1/6/298 .  It represents my
current idea about how to do that.

It has some problems.

First, note that the list manipulations in dpm_suspend(), 
device_power_down(), and so on aren't protected by dpm_list_mtx.  So 
your patch could corrupt the list pointers.

Yes, they need the locking.  I have overlooked that, mostly because the locking
was removed by gregkh-driver-pm-acquire-device-locks-prior-to-suspending.patch
too (because you assumed there woundn't be any need to remove a device during
a suspend, right?).

Are you assuming that no other threads can be running at this time?

No, I'm not.

Note also that device_pm_destroy_suspended() does up(&dev->sem), but it 
doesn't know whether or not dev->sem was locked to begin with.

Do you mean it might have been released already by another thread
calling device_pm_destroy_suspended() on the same device?

Do you want to rule out the possibility of a driver's suspend or remove 
methods calling destroy_suspended_device() on its own device?  With 
your synchronous approach, this would mean that the suspend/resume 
method would indirectly end up calling the remove method.  This is 
dangerous at best; with USB it would be a lockdep violation.  With an 
asynchronous approach, on the other hand, this wouldn't be a problem.

Well, the asynchronous apprach has the problem that the device may end up
on a wrong list when removed by one of the .suspend() callbacks (and I don't
see how to avoid that without extra complexity).  Perhaps that's something we
can live with, though.

One more question: is there any particular reason not to call
device_pm_remove() at the beginning of device_del()?

Rafael