Date: Thu, 24 Apr 2014 16:52:06 +0200
From: Johan Hovold <jhovold@gmail.com>
To: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Cc: Li Zhong <zhong@linux.vnet.ibm.com>, Johan Hovold <jhovold@gmail.com>,
        Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>,
        Alan Stern <stern@rowland.harvard.edu>, linux-usb@vger.kernel.org,
        linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, rafael.j.wysocki@intel.com
Subject: Re: [PATCH] USB: serial: fix sysfs-attribute removal deadlock
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On Thu, Apr 24, 2014 at 10:35:17AM -0400, Tejun Heo wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 24, 2014 at 04:29:15PM +0800, Li Zhong wrote:
> > On Wed, 2014-04-23 at 10:19 -0400, Tejun Heo wrote:
> > > cc'ing Li Zhong who's working on a simliar issue in the following
> > > thread and quoting whole body.
> > > 
> > >   http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/1680706
> > > 
> > > Li, this is another variation of the same problem.  Maybe this can be
> > > covered by your work too?
> > 
> > It seems to me that it is about write something to driver attribute, and
> > driver unloading. If so, maybe it's not easy to reuse the help functions
> > created for device attribute, and device removing.
> > 
> > But I guess the idea to break the active protection could still be
> > applied here:
> > 
> > Maybe we could try_module_get() here (like the other option suggested by
> > Johan?), and break active protection if we could get the module,
> > something like below? 
> 
> I don't get why try_module_get() matters here.  We can't call into
> ->store if the object at hand is already destroyed and the underlying
> module can't go away if the target device is still alive.
> try_module_get() doesn't actually protect the object.  Why does that
> matter?  This is self removal, right?  Can you please take a look at
> kernfs_remove_self()?

No, this isn't self removal. The driver-attribute (not device-attribute)
store operation simply grabs a lock that is also held while the driver
is being deregistered at module unload. Taking a reference to the module
in this case will prevent deregistration while store is running.

But it seems like this can be solved for usb-serial by simply not
holding the lock while deregistering.

Johan
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