On Monday, 7 of January 2008, Alan Stern wrote:
quoted text
> Let's try to summarize the main issues here:
> 
>      1. We want the PM core to lock all devices during suspend and
> 	hibernation.  This implies that registration and unregistration
> 	at such times can't work, because they need to lock the
> 	device sem in order to make probe and remove method calls.
> 
>      2. Registration calls can be failed, with an error message in the
> 	system log.  However unregistration calls cannot fail.  They
> 	_can_ block until the system resumes, but if the unregistration
> 	call was made from within a suspend or resume method it will
> 	deadlock.  This seems inescapable, but at least we should print
> 	an error in the log so the offending driver can be identified.
> 
>      3. In response to 2, the PM core should have a special routine for
> 	unregistering devices while a suspend is in progress.  Rafael
> 	proposed that the core should unlock the device to permit the
> 	call to go through.  This seems dangerous to me; I would prefer
> 	to leave the locks in place and defer the unregistration until
> 	after the system is back up and the locks have all been 
> 	dropped.  This would avoid all sorts of locking, deadlock, and 
> 	mutual exclusion problems.
> 
> (As a side note: destroy_suspended_device() has a rather limited
> interface anyway, since it can handle only devices that were created by
> create_device().)
> 
>      4. Rafael pointed out that unregistration can occur concurrently
> 	with system suspend.  When this happens we can end up trying to
> 	suspend a device which has already been through 
> 	bus_remove_device(), because it hasn't yet been removed from 
> 	the dpm_active list.  He proposes we make unregistration block
> 	system suspend, just as registration does.
> 
> I don't see 4 as a real problem.  Starting an unregistration before
> the suspend and finishing it afterward should be okay.  Once a device
> has gone through bus_remove_device() it hasn't got a suspend method any
> more, so trying to suspend it won't do anything at all -- the tests in
> suspend_device() will all fail.  Conversely, if bus_remove_device()  
> hasn't run yet then we would end up calling the driver's suspend method
> before the device_del() call returns.  As Johannes pointed out, this is
> a normal race that would exist anyway.
> 
> On the other hand, having unregistration block system suspend wouldn't 
> actually be wrong.  I simply don't think it is necessary.  But note 
> that making the two mutually exclusive would complicate Rafael's 
> synchronous approach for destroy_suspended_device().
> 
>      5. All the discussion about pm_sleep_rwsem and so on is 
> 	implementation details.  Once we have settled on the correct
> 	approach for 1-4, the implementation should be relatively easy.

Please see the patch at: http://lkml.org/lkml/2008/1/6/298 .  It represents my
current idea about how to do that.

Thanks,
Rafael
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