Re: [RFC 0/2] refcount: attempt to avoid imbalance warnings

[Alexander Aring]

Hi,

On Thu, Jun 30, 2022 at 12:34 PM Linus Torvalds
<torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Jun 30, 2022 at 6:59 AM Alexander Aring <aahringo@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > I send this patch series as RFC because it was necessary to do a kref
> > change after adding __cond_lock() to refcount_dec_and_lock()
> > functionality.
>
> Can you try something like this instead?
>
> This is two separate patches - one for sparse, and one for the kernel.
>
> This is only *very* lightly tested (ie I tested it on a single kernel
> file that used refcount_dec_and_lock())
>

yes that avoids the warnings for fs/dlm.c by calling unlock() when the
kref_put_lock() returns true.

However there exists other users of kref_put_lock() which drops a
sparse warning now after those patches e.g.  net/sunrpc/svcauth.c.
I think I can explain why. It is that kref_put_lock() has a release
callback and it's _optional_ that this release callback calls the
unlock(). If the release callback calls unlock() then the user of
kref_put_lock() signals this with a releases() annotation of the
passed release callback.

It seems that sparse is not detecting this annotation anymore when
it's passed as callback and the function pointer parameter declaration
of kref_put_lock() does not have such annotation. The annotation gets
"dropped" then.

If I change the parameter order and add a annotation to the release
callback, like:

__kref_put_lock(struct kref *kref, spinlock_t *lock,
               void (*release)(struct kref *kref) __releases(lock))
#define kref_put_lock(kref, release, lock) __kref_put_lock(kref, lock, release)

the problem is gone but forces every user to release the lock in the
release callback which isn't required and also cuts the API because
the lock which you want to call unlock() on can be not part of your
container_of(kref) struct.

Then I did a similar thing before which would solve it for every user
because there is simply no function pointer passed as parameter and
the annotation gets never "dropped":

#define kref_put_lock(kref, release, lock) \
(refcount_dec_and_lock(&(kref)->refcount, lock) ? ({ release(kref); 1; }) : 0)

Maybe a functionality of forwarding function annotation if passed as a
function pointer (function pointer declared without annotations) as in
e.g. kref_put_lock() can be added into sparse?

- Alex