This series improves the way DRM bridges are allocated and initialized and makes them reference-counted. The goal of reference counting is to avoid use-after-free by drivers which got a pointer to a bridge and keep it stored and used even after the bridge has been deallocated.
The overall goal is supporting Linux devices with a DRM pipeline whose final components can be hot-plugged and hot-unplugged, including one or more bridges. For more details see the big picture [0]. DRM bridge drivers will have to be adapted to the new API -- the change is trivial for most cases. This series converts two of them to serve as an example. The remaining ones will be done as a follow-up after this first part is merged. After that, refcounting will have to be added on the two sides: all functions returning a bridge pointer and all code obtaining such a pointer. A few examples have been sent in v7 (link below), they are OK, but I removed them from v8 because they must be merged only after converting all bridges. Here's the grand plan: A. add new alloc API and refcounting (this series, at least patches 1-3) B. after (A), convert all bridge drivers to new API C. after (A), add documentation and kunit tests D. after (B), add get/put to drm_bridge_add/remove() + attach/detech() (patches 3-4 in the v7 series) E. after (B), convert accessors (including patches 5-9 in the v7 series which convert drm_bridge_chain_get_first_bridge() and its users); this is a large work and can be done in chunks Series layout: 1. Add the new API and refcounting: drm/bridge: add devm_drm_bridge_alloc() drm/bridge: add support for refcounting drm/bridge: deprecate old-style bridge allocation 2. convert a few bridge drivers (bridge providers) to the new API: drm/bridge: ti-sn65dsi83: use dynamic lifetime management drm/bridge: samsung-dsim: use dynamic lifetime management [0] https://lore.kernel.org/dri-devel/20250206-hotplug-drm-bridge-v6-0-9d6f2c9c3...@bootlin.com/ Signed-off-by: Luca Ceresoli <luca.ceres...@bootlin.com> --- Changes in v8: - Applied requested changes to patch 2 - Add R-by to other patches - Removed v7 patches 3-9: they are OK but must wait until all bridge drivers are converted to the new API - Added patch to deprecate old-style bridge allocation - Link to v7: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20250314-drm-bridge-refcount-v7-0-152571f8c...@bootlin.com --- Luca Ceresoli (5): drm/bridge: add devm_drm_bridge_alloc() drm/bridge: add support for refcounting drm/bridge: deprecate old-style bridge allocation drm/bridge: ti-sn65dsi83: use dynamic lifetime management drm/bridge: samsung-dsim: use dynamic lifetime management drivers/gpu/drm/bridge/samsung-dsim.c | 7 ++- drivers/gpu/drm/bridge/ti-sn65dsi83.c | 7 ++- drivers/gpu/drm/drm_bridge.c | 96 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ include/drm/drm_bridge.h | 36 +++++++++++++ 4 files changed, 138 insertions(+), 8 deletions(-) --- base-commit: c940d00c7306a77ec293661abca634756207c885 change-id: 20250314-drm-bridge-refcount-58d9503503f6 Best regards, -- Luca Ceresoli <luca.ceres...@bootlin.com>