Subject: Re: [RFC][PATCH -mm 3/3] PM: Disable _request_firmware before
	hibernation/suspend
From: Kay Sievers <kay.sievers@vrfy.org>
To: Pavel Machek <pavel@ucw.cz>
Cc: "Rafael J. Wysocki" <rjw@sisk.pl>, Matthew Garrett <mjg59@srcf.ucam.org>,
       pm list <linux-pm@lists.linux-foundation.org>,
       LKML <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
       Nigel Cunningham <nigel@nigel.suspend2.net>,
       Alan Stern <stern@rowland.harvard.edu>,
       Oliver Neukum <oliver@neukum.org>
In-Reply-To: <20070528111554.GF18807@elf.ucw.cz>
References: <200705272229.21263.rjw@sisk.pl>
	 <20070527220412.GC22687@srcf.ucam.org>
	 <1180304166.3131.66.camel@lov.localdomain> <200705280943.54312.rjw@sisk.pl>
	 <20070528111554.GF18807@elf.ucw.cz>
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Date: Mon, 28 May 2007 13:24:53 +0200
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On Mon, 2007-05-28 at 13:15 +0200, Pavel Machek wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> > > > > What exactly is the problem we see here? The timeout of the firmware loader?
> > > > > What goes wrong with frozen userspace, usually there is only a netlink
> > > > > message sent from the kernel, which should be received and handled
> > > > > just fine when userspace is running again.
> > > > 
> > > > Driver calls request_firmware in the resume method. The userspace helper 
> > > > can't be run because it's been frozen, so the firmware never gets loaded 
> > > > and the call times out. The driver then fails to resume. While all this 
> > > > is happening, the rest of the kernel is blocking on that resume method. 
> > > > The firmware can be loaded once userspace has been started again, but by 
> > > > that time the driver has given up.
> > > 
> > > Seems, that's just the broken synchronous firmware loading interface
> > > with the useless timeout handling. The nowait version of the same loader
> > > doesn't time out, and should not have that problem. The sync version
> > > should be removed from the kernel, it just causes all sorts of problems
> > > since it exists.
> > > 
> > > Userspace should handle the async request just fine when it comes back
> > > running, regardless of the time it was submitted.
> > 
> > Okay, so the solution is to convert the drivers to use
> > request_firmware_nowait() instead of request_firmware() in their .resume()
> > routines.
> 
> You'll just get deadlock at different level (and more rare).
> 
> Imagine disk with its firmware on NFS and NFS with its firmware on
> disk.
> 
> (Or maybe firmware loader doing find /, including both disk and
> NFS). Just don't call request_firmware_* from .resume().

A driver for a bootup-critical device like this should just never
release the firmware after the first load. There is absolutely no point
in doing that.

Kay

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