On Wed, 26 Mar 2008, Rafael J. Wysocki wrote:

quoted text
> On Wednesday, 26 of March 2008, Alan Stern wrote:
> > On Tue, 25 Mar 2008, Rafael J. Wysocki wrote:
> > 
> > > > I just thought of another problem.  At the point where
> > > > local_irq_disable() is called, in between device_suspend() and
> > > > device_power_down(), it is possible in a preemptible kernel that
> > > > another task is holding dpm_list_mtx and is in the middle of updating
> > > > the list pointers.  This would mess up the traversal in
> > > > device_power_down().
> > > > 
> > > > I'm not sure about the best way to prevent this.  Is it legal to call
> > > > unlock_mutex() while interrupts or preemption are disabled?
> > > 
> > > Well, I think it is, but I'm not sure how that can help.
> > > 
> > > To prevent the race from happening, we can lock dpm_list_mtx before switching
> > > interrupts off in kernel/power/main.c:suspend_enter() and analogously in
> > > kernel/power/disk.c .
> > 
> > That's right.  And once interrupts are turned off you should unlock 
> > dpm_list_mtx again, in case a noirq method wants to unregister a 
> > device.
> 
> Why would a noirq method want to do that?  IMO, it's not a big deal if noirq
> methods are not allowed to unregister devices.

Okay, that's fine.  It keeps things simple.

quoted text
> > Hence my question: Is it legal to call unlock_mutex() while interrupts are
> > disabled? 
> 
> Well, I suspect that will confuse lockdep quite a bit.  Otherwise, I don't see
> a problem with it (it's just changing the value of a shared variable after
> all).

Then you have your answer.  Perhaps have device_suspend() exit with the
mutex held and have device_resume() release it (with appropriate
handling for error situations, of course).

Alan Stern

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