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author | Rafael J. Wysocki <rafael.j.wysocki@intel.com> | 2016-10-30 17:32:16 +0100 |
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committer | Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org> | 2016-10-31 11:36:20 -0600 |
commit | 9ed9895370aedd6032af2a9181c62c394d08223b (patch) | |
tree | 9cb133714d76646996248082a6231ab97103bf3a /Documentation/x86 | |
parent | bb41d2a51f0ed379cbe6b2f73271688784c40a1a (diff) | |
download | linux-9ed9895370aedd6032af2a9181c62c394d08223b.tar.gz linux-9ed9895370aedd6032af2a9181c62c394d08223b.tar.bz2 linux-9ed9895370aedd6032af2a9181c62c394d08223b.zip |
driver core: Functional dependencies tracking support
Currently, there is a problem with taking functional dependencies
between devices into account.
What I mean by a "functional dependency" is when the driver of device
B needs device A to be functional and (generally) its driver to be
present in order to work properly. This has certain consequences
for power management (suspend/resume and runtime PM ordering) and
shutdown ordering of these devices. In general, it also implies that
the driver of A needs to be working for B to be probed successfully
and it cannot be unbound from the device before the B's driver.
Support for representing those functional dependencies between
devices is added here to allow the driver core to track them and act
on them in certain cases where applicable.
The argument for doing that in the driver core is that there are
quite a few distinct use cases involving device dependencies, they
are relatively hard to get right in a driver (if one wants to
address all of them properly) and it only gets worse if multiplied
by the number of drivers potentially needing to do it. Morever, at
least one case (asynchronous system suspend/resume) cannot be handled
in a single driver at all, because it requires the driver of A to
wait for B to suspend (during system suspend) and the driver of B to
wait for A to resume (during system resume).
For this reason, represent dependencies between devices as "links",
with the help of struct device_link objects each containing pointers
to the "linked" devices, a list node for each of them, status
information, flags, and an RCU head for synchronization.
Also add two new list heads, representing the lists of links to the
devices that depend on the given one (consumers) and to the devices
depended on by it (suppliers), and a "driver presence status" field
(needed for figuring out initial states of device links) to struct
device.
The entire data structure consisting of all of the lists of link
objects for all devices is protected by a mutex (for link object
addition/removal and for list walks during device driver probing
and removal) and by SRCU (for list walking in other case that will
be introduced by subsequent change sets). If CONFIG_SRCU is not
selected, however, an rwsem is used for protecting the entire data
structure.
In addition, each link object has an internal status field whose
value reflects whether or not drivers are bound to the devices
pointed to by the link or probing/removal of their drivers is in
progress etc. That field is only modified under the device links
mutex, but it may be read outside of it in some cases (introduced by
subsequent change sets), so modifications of it are annotated with
WRITE_ONCE().
New links are added by calling device_link_add() which takes three
arguments: pointers to the devices in question and flags. In
particular, if DL_FLAG_STATELESS is set in the flags, the link status
is not to be taken into account for this link and the driver core
will not manage it. In turn, if DL_FLAG_AUTOREMOVE is set in the
flags, the driver core will remove the link automatically when the
consumer device driver unbinds from it.
One of the actions carried out by device_link_add() is to reorder
the lists used for device shutdown and system suspend/resume to
put the consumer device along with all of its children and all of
its consumers (and so on, recursively) to the ends of those lists
in order to ensure the right ordering between all of the supplier
and consumer devices.
For this reason, it is not possible to create a link between two
devices if the would-be supplier device already depends on the
would-be consumer device as either a direct descendant of it or a
consumer of one of its direct descendants or one of its consumers
and so on.
There are two types of link objects, persistent and non-persistent.
The persistent ones stay around until one of the target devices is
deleted, while the non-persistent ones are removed automatically when
the consumer driver unbinds from its device (ie. they are assumed to
be valid only as long as the consumer device has a driver bound to
it). Persistent links are created by default and non-persistent
links are created when the DL_FLAG_AUTOREMOVE flag is passed
to device_link_add().
Both persistent and non-persistent device links can be deleted
with an explicit call to device_link_del().
Links created without the DL_FLAG_STATELESS flag set are managed
by the driver core using a simple state machine. There are 5 states
each link can be in: DORMANT (unused), AVAILABLE (the supplier driver
is present and functional), CONSUMER_PROBE (the consumer driver is
probing), ACTIVE (both supplier and consumer drivers are present and
functional), and SUPPLIER_UNBIND (the supplier driver is unbinding).
The driver core updates the link state automatically depending on
what happens to the linked devices and for each link state specific
actions are taken in addition to that.
For example, if the supplier driver unbinds from its device, the
driver core will also unbind the drivers of all of its consumers
automatically under the assumption that they cannot function
properly without the supplier. Analogously, the driver core will
only allow the consumer driver to bind to its device if the
supplier driver is present and functional (ie. the link is in
the AVAILABLE state). If that's not the case, it will rely on
the existing deferred probing mechanism to wait for the supplier
driver to become available.
Signed-off-by: Rafael J. Wysocki <rafael.j.wysocki@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
Diffstat (limited to 'Documentation/x86')
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