On Thu Jan 29, 2026 at 3:49 PM CET, Laurent Pinchart wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 29, 2026 at 08:50:30AM -0500, Bartosz Golaszewski wrote:
>> On Thu, 29 Jan 2026 11:56:34 +0100, Laurent Pinchart said:
>> > On Thu, Jan 29, 2026 at 10:11:46AM +0100, Bartosz Golaszewski wrote:
>> >>
>> >> For I2C both the problem is different (subsystem waiting forever for
>> >> consumers to release all references) and the culprit: memory used to
>> >> hold the reference-counted struct device is released the supplier
>> >> unbind unconditionally. Unfortunately there's no way around it other
>> >> than to first move it into a separate chunk managed by i2c core.
>> >
>> > Isn't there ? Can't the driver-specific data structure be
>> > reference-counted instead of unconditionally freed at unbind time ?
>>
>> Oh, for sure, if we did from the start. But we did not and there are now
>> hundreds of i2c drivers that do:
>>
>> struct my_i2c_drv_data {
>> struct i2c_adapter adap;
>> int my_other_drv_data;
>> };
>>
>> and in probe:
>>
>> struct my_i2c_drv_data *data = devm_kzalloc(dev, sizeof(*data), GFP_KERNEL);
>>
>> (or just kzalloc() with kfree() in remove, it doesn't matter)
>>
>> and the ownership of that data belongs to the driver. There's no way we could
>> address it now so the next best thing is to work towards moving the ownership
>> of struct i2c_adapter to the i2c core and make it reference counted using the
>> internal kobject of the associated struct device.
>
> What I'm reading here is essentially that we rolled out devm_kzalloc() too
> quickly without understanding the consequences, and it has spread so much that
> it can't be fixed properly now, so we need to find a workaround.
I'm pretty sure I don't have all the details about the problem with the
i2c_adapter, but from what I read here briefly the problem simply seems to be
that currently the driver providing the i2c_adapter frees the i2c_adapter on
driver unbind unconditionally.
I would argue that this is a violation of the driver core design anyways. I
mean, in the end an i2c_adapter is the same type of device as any other bus
device (platform, PCI, etc.).
For instance, when the physical device that is represented by a PCI device is
removed from the machine, the corresponding struct pci_dev is not forcefully
freed either, it stays around as long as there are references to the device.
So, I fail to see how devm_kmalloc() and frieds are the root cause of the
i2c_adapter lifetime problem?
> And now we're trying to work around the problem by rolling out a revocable API
> that has barely seen any testing, and is known to have design issues. Does any
> one else see the irony ? :-)
I don't think anyone is trying to work around problems with devm_kmalloc() and
friends. It's just system memory, i.e. nothing that needs to be revoked. We can
just not use devm_kmalloc() and friends if we need the memory to outlive driver
unbind for some reason. The problem is about real device resources, such as I/O
memory mappings that *must* be released when a driver is unbound from its
device. So, revocable is clearly not a fix for devm_kmalloc() et al.
