Re: loading firmware while usermodehelper disabled.

On 31/12/11 00:22, Linus Torvalds wrote:

It's also possible that we should blame the firmware code, which is
expressly written to encourage these kinds of bugs. It may be that i
tshould be the firmware code that has a "get_firmware()" +
"put_firmware()" model, and it should cache the firmware explicitly if
the config supports suspend, so that a firmware read at resume time
would actually work. The whole "request_firmware()" interface really
is very prone to these kinds of bugs.

How about these semantics for get_firmware / put_firmware:

get_firmware -> checks for a cached copy of the firmware and returns
that if it exists otherwise calls _get_firmware (i.e.
_request_firmware). Either way we get a refcount to the firmware blob.
This requires adding 3 members to struct firmware: the refcount, the
name of the firmware (see @name in request_firmware) and a list head to
cache with. We could also add and async version of this to match
request_firmware_nowait.

put_firmware -> Removes a refcount from the firmware and frees if there
are no more users.

put_firmware is called when we are sure that we no longer need to reload
the firmware for that device - device close time for most drivers.

USB is a more difficult case as devices can change ID but the firmware
blob still needs to be associated with them. I don't know USB at all so
I have no idea if we can track this. Some PCI devices may also suffer
the same problem.

Hope this is useful,

Jack