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Date: Thu, 15 Nov 2001 00:28:22 -0800
From: Andrew Morton <akpm@zip.com.au>
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To: Jeff Garzik <jgarzik@mandrakesoft.com>
CC: Alexander Viro <viro@math.psu.edu>,
        Linus Torvalds <torvalds@transmeta.com>, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [RFC] races in access to pci_devices
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Jeff Garzik wrote:
> 
> I haven't looked at it in over a year, but from a quick look, all the
> list access look like they can be protected by a simple spinlock.

I don't think so?   We do things like calling driver probe methods
in the middle of a driver list walk.

An rwsem _may_ be suitable, but I'm not sure that we don't do
a nested walk in some circumstances, and AFAIK our rwsems
still are not safe for the same thread to do a down_read() twice.

Then there's the bus list, and the order of its lock wrt the device
list.

One approach would be to use a spinlock and a per-device refcount.
So something like:

	spin_lock(&pci_dev_lock);
        dev = pci_dev_g(pci_devices.next);
	while (dev != pci_dev_g(&pci_devices)) {
		struct pci_dev *next;

		pci_dev_get(dev);
		spin_unlock(&pci_dev_lock);
		diddle(dev);
		spin_lock(&pci_dev_lock);
		next = pci_dev_g(dev->global_list.next);
		pci_dev_put(dev);
		dev = next;
        }
	spin_unlock(&pci_dev_lock);

pci_dev_get(struct pci_dev *dev)
{
#ifdef CONFIG_SMP
	if (!spin_is_locked(&pci_dev_lock))
		BUG();
#endif
	dev->refcount++;
}

pci_dev_put(struct pci_dev *dev)
{
#ifdef CONFIG_SMP
	if (!spin_is_locked(&pci_dev_lock))
		BUG();
#endif
	dev->refcount--;
	if (dev->refcount == 0)
		kfree(dev);
}

I _think_ all this list traversal happens in process context now.
Not sure about the PCI hotplug driver though.

It's really sticky.  Which is why it isn't fixed :(

Sigh.  Maybe go for an rwsem in 2.5, backport when it stops
deadlocking?


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