Hi David, On Mon, Jun 15 2026, David Matlack wrote:
> On 2026-06-14 01:38 PM, Pasha Tatashin wrote: >> On Fri, 22 May 2026 20:24:01 +0000, David Matlack <[email protected]> >> wrote: [...] >> > + } >> > + >> > + pci_info(dev, "Device was preserved by previous kernel across Live >> > Update\n"); >> > + dev->liveupdate.incoming = dev_ser; >> > + >> > + /* >> > + * Hold the ref on the incoming FLB until pci_liveupdate_finish() so >> > + * that dev->liveupdate.incoming does not get freed while it is in use. >> > + */ >> >> How would that work? If finish is not called FLB stays around until the >> next reboot. > > True... I think if the PCI core trusts drivers to call > pci_liveupdate_finish() then we don't need to hold onto the incoming > reference here. That was my point when I was arguing against refcounts on outgoing FLBs. This is very easy to abuse, especially when we are talking about device drivers. And this refcounting mechanism makes the FLB no longer file-lifecycle-bound, since now it is entirely up to drivers to decide the lifecycle of this data. I have been thinking about this a bit more in the last couple days, and I wonder if we are doing this right. Here's an idea I have been thinking of. We should make live update a first class citizen in PCI. Instead of patching in liveupdate via the liveupdate.incoming field, and letting drivers figure out when to use it, we should separate out probe and retrieve paths entirely. Probe and retrieve are fundamentally different operations. While they may share some common initialization logic for the _software_ state, how they interface with the hardware is completely different. I think mixing the two will result in driver code being more spaghetti by having liveupdate checks sprayed out all over. This series doesn't add support for any drivers, but looking at some of the code we have downstream, I see this problem. The liveupdate code is all over the place in the driver and it is very hard to wrap one's head around how the device is actually retrieved. So I think PCI core should track preserved devices, and if the device is preserved, it should skip the probe and wait for retrieve. Retrieve does the full initialization of the device. This fits in with the LUO model as well. You can make retrieve a callback of struct pci_driver and do some wrappers to talk with LUO, so device drivers don't directly interface with LUO at all. We should do similar things on the shutdown path. Shutdown is a fundamentally different operation from freeze, and so we should separate them out as well. This solves the lifetime problem as well. When PCI core is initializing, it knows for sure that no retrievals are going to happen. That's because none of the drivers have registered yet. So it can safely access the FLB and initialize its state. After that, drivers can register themselves and start accepting retrieve() calls. Once the last driver goes away, the FLB is freed automatically. I am sorry for suggesting a big refactor at v6, but the early versions looked good to me at the time, and I only thought more deeply about this when trying to figure out how we can make the lifetimes cleaner. What do you think? Does this make sense? -- Regards, Pratyush Yadav
