On Thu, 17 Sep 2015, Rafael J. Wysocki wrote:
> Note: Problems also may happen if device A depends on device B and its
> driver to be present and functional and then the B's driver module is
> unloaded. The core doesn't prevent that from happening AFAICS.
It also doesn't prevent B's driver from being unbound from the B
device.
To some extent the kernel _does_ prevent driver modules from being
unloaded. If A's driver uses code resources provided by B's driver
then the module's refcount would be larger than 0.
> I'd like to go back to my initial hunch that the driver knowing about
> a dependency on another one should tell the core about that, so the
> core can make the right things happen at various times (like system
> suspend/resume etc).
>
> What if we introduce a mechanism allowing drivers to say "I depend on
> device X and its driver to be present and functional from now on" and
> store that information somewhere for the core to use?
>
> Some time ago (a few years ago actually IIRC) I proposed something
> called "PM links". The idea was to have objects representing such
> dependencies, although I was not taking the "the driver of the device
> I depend on should be present and functional going forward" condition.
>
> Say, if a driver wants to check the presence of the device+driver it
> needs to be functional, it will do something like
>
> ret = create_pm_link(dev, producer);
>
> and that will return -EPROBE_DEFER if the producer device is not
> functional. If success is returned, the link has been created and now
> the core will take it into account.
>
> On driver removal the core may just delete the links where the device
> is the "consumer". Also there may be a delete_pm_link(dev, producer)
> operation if needed.
>
> The creation of a link may then include the reordering of dpm_list as
> appropriate so all "producers" are now followed by all of their
> "consumers". Going forward, though, the core may use the links to
> make all "producers" wait for the PM callbacks of their "consumers" to
> complete during system suspend etc. It also may use them to prevent
> drivers being depended on from being unloaded and/or to force the
> removal of drivers that depend on something being removed. In
> principle it may also use those links to coordinate runtime PM
> transitions, but I guess that's not going to be useful in all cases,
> so there needs to be an opt-in mechanism for that.
>
> Please tell me what you think.
Sounds familiar. I recall this basic approach from a Plumbers
conference some years ago -- maybe that was when you first proposed it!
You might want to categorize the dependencies into different types. I
can think of three types offhand:
The target device must be present before the current device
can be probed (hard to imagine how that could be stored as a PM
link if the target device isn't present, though);
The target device must be bound to a driver before the current
device can be probed;
The target device must be at full power whenever the current
device is.
Maybe you can think of others.
[Oddly enough, the USB subsystem has some dependencies that don't fall
into any of these categories. They have to do with the peculiar way in
which a low- or full-speed device is handed off from a high-speed
controller to its companion low/full-speed controller, and they apply
only to system resume, not to normal operation. (That is, device A
requires device B to be at full power when A is being resumed from a
system sleep, but not when A is operating normally or when A is being
runtime-resumed.) For such things, we should keep the existing
device_pm_wait_for_dev() API.]
This sounds like a big change, but it might be worthwhile.
Alan Stern
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