Re: [PATCH] HID: input: return ENODATA if reading battery attrs fails

[David Herrmann]

Hi

On Wed, May 15, 2013 at 4:58 PM, David Herrmann <dh.herrmann@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hi Anton
>
> On Tue, May 14, 2013 at 1:20 AM, Anton Vorontsov <anton@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> On Mon, May 13, 2013 at 05:01:30PM +0200, David Herrmann wrote:
>> [..]
>>> I really dislike the way power_supply core calls into the drivers during the
>>> "add" uevent. If a driver holds an I/O mutex (or anything else), it might
>>> even deadlock in a very non-obvious way. Is there a reason why we need to
>>> pass _all_ battery properties along "add" and "remove" uevents? Isn't it
>>> enough to pass them with "change" uevents? This would guarantee that the
>>> power_supply callbacks are only called from user-context and "change" events.
>>
>> I don't think that there is a particular reason for that, but if you want
>> to change that, then I'd suggest to still keep uevent reporting of all the
>> properties on "add" and "remove" events, but don't actually call the
>> drivers' callback, just assume ENODATA.
>
> In case of ENODATA the property is entirely skipped and not included
> in the uevent. Therefore, "assuming ENODATA" would be skipping all
> properties.
>
>> This way we well preserve the behaviour of the older kernels, so that
>> userland will not break if, for example, it allocates needed memory on
>> "add" event, and then assumes that "change" will follow the pattern.
>
> I tried fixing this several ways, but there is one deadlock that we
> cannot overcome. If we assume a driver holds a lock during
> power_supply_unregister() that it also acquires in the get_property
> callback, then we will always deadlock. Just think of one CPU
> currently calling the power_supply_changed_work() callback while
> another CPU currently holds the driver's lock and calls
> power_supply_unregister(). power_supply_changed_work() will wait for
> the lock, while power_supply_unregister() will wait synchronously for
> the work to finish => deadlock
>
> As a side-note, in *_uevent() callbacks we have no chance to see what
> kind of event this is. We would have to fix lib/kobject_uevent.c to
> provide this information.
>
> So I am back to fixing drivers to allow I/O / safe callbacks while
> calling power_supply_register()/unregister(). This might be easy for
> HID-USB drivers to implement (there is hid_device_io_start/stop()),
> but for Bluetooth HID devices, this will not work as there are
> bluetooth locks that are still held. And fixing HIDP isn't enough, we
> would actually have to go all the way down to fix Bluetooth HCI core
> to provide more fine-grained locking (at least one per hci_conn). And
> even then I am not sure how to allow I/O while loading/unloading
> drivers on it.
>
> So if anybody wants to step up and fix this mess, feel free to go. I
> will give up here. I might try to extend Bluetooth HIDP to allow I/O

It was a bit naive to think my brain would just let this go.. So while
I tried to sleep, my brain decided to continue working on this and
despite it being a fairly hard to solve issue, I could come up with a
race-free HIDP fix. With that prepared, we can actually make HID core
allow I/O during device registration.

During unregistration, the I/O layer will report ENODEV/EIO, anyway,
so we don't have this hang in that case.

I will try to move power_supply registration to a place where we can
safely allow I/O in HID device registration. Then we should at least
be good to go for HID devices.

Cheers
David
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