Re: [PATCH 2/2] kobject: send KOBJ_REMOVE uevent when the object is removed from sysfs

[Greg Kroah-Hartman]

On Mon, May 25, 2020 at 03:49:01PM -0700, Dmitry Torokhov wrote:
> On Sun, May 24, 2020 at 8:34 AM Greg Kroah-Hartman
> <gregkh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > It is possible for a KOBJ_REMOVE uevent to be sent to userspace way
> > after the files are actually gone from sysfs, due to how reference
> > counting for kobjects work.  This should not be a problem, but it would
> > be good to properly send the information when things are going away, not
> > at some later point in time in the future.
> >
> > Before this move, if a kobject's parent was torn down before the child,
> 
> ^^^^ And this is the root of the problem and what has to be fixed.

I fixed that in patch one of this series.  Turns out the user of the
kobject was not even expecting that to happen.

> > when the call to kobject_uevent() happened, the parent walk to try to
> > reconstruct the full path of the kobject could be a total mess and cause
> > crashes.  It's not good to try to tear down a kobject tree from top
> > down, but let's at least try to not to crash if a user does so.
> 
> One can try, but if we keep proper reference counting then kobject
> core should take care of actually releasing objects in the right
> order. I do not think you should keep this patch, and instead see if
> we can push call to kobject_put(kobj->parent) into kobject_cleanup().

I tried that, but there was a _lot_ of underflow errors reported, so
there's something else happening.  Or my attempt was incorrect :)

thanks,

greg k-h