[PATCH v3 08/14] drm/gem/shmem: Extract drm_gem_shmem_release() from drm_gem_shmem_free()

From: Lyude Paul
Date: Fri Aug 29 2025 - 18:44:11 EST


At the moment the way that freeing gem shmem objects is not ideal for rust
bindings. drm_gem_shmem_free() releases all of the associated memory with a
gem shmem object with kfree(), which means that for us to correctly release
a gem shmem object in rust we have to manually drop all of the contents of
our gem object structure in-place by hand before finally calling
drm_gem_shmem_free() to release the shmem resources and the allocation for
the gem object.

Since the only reason this is an issue is because of drm_gem_shmem_free()
calling kfree(), we can fix this by splitting drm_gem_shmem_free() out into
itself and drm_gem_shmem_release(), where drm_gem_shmem_release() releases
the various gem shmem resources without freeing the structure itself. With
this, we can safely re-acquire the KBox for the gem object's memory
allocation and let rust handle cleaning up all of the other struct members
automatically.

Signed-off-by: Lyude Paul <lyude@xxxxxxxxxx>
---
drivers/gpu/drm/drm_gem_shmem_helper.c | 23 ++++++++++++++++++-----
include/drm/drm_gem_shmem_helper.h | 1 +
2 files changed, 19 insertions(+), 5 deletions(-)

diff --git a/drivers/gpu/drm/drm_gem_shmem_helper.c b/drivers/gpu/drm/drm_gem_shmem_helper.c
index b20a7b75c7228..50594cf8e17cc 100644
--- a/drivers/gpu/drm/drm_gem_shmem_helper.c
+++ b/drivers/gpu/drm/drm_gem_shmem_helper.c
@@ -175,13 +175,13 @@ struct drm_gem_shmem_object *drm_gem_shmem_create_with_mnt(struct drm_device *de
EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL(drm_gem_shmem_create_with_mnt);

/**
- * drm_gem_shmem_free - Free resources associated with a shmem GEM object
- * @shmem: shmem GEM object to free
+ * drm_gem_shmem_release - Release resources associated with a shmem GEM object.
+ * @shmem: shmem GEM object
*
- * This function cleans up the GEM object state and frees the memory used to
- * store the object itself.
+ * This function cleans up the GEM object state, but does not free the memory used to store the
+ * object itself. This function is meant to be a dedicated helper for the Rust GEM bindings.
*/
-void drm_gem_shmem_free(struct drm_gem_shmem_object *shmem)
+void drm_gem_shmem_release(struct drm_gem_shmem_object *shmem)
{
struct drm_gem_object *obj = &shmem->base;

@@ -208,6 +208,19 @@ void drm_gem_shmem_free(struct drm_gem_shmem_object *shmem)
}

drm_gem_object_release(obj);
+}
+EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL(drm_gem_shmem_release);
+
+/**
+ * drm_gem_shmem_free - Free resources associated with a shmem GEM object
+ * @shmem: shmem GEM object to free
+ *
+ * This function cleans up the GEM object state and frees the memory used to
+ * store the object itself.
+ */
+void drm_gem_shmem_free(struct drm_gem_shmem_object *shmem)
+{
+ drm_gem_shmem_release(shmem);
kfree(shmem);
}
EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL(drm_gem_shmem_free);
diff --git a/include/drm/drm_gem_shmem_helper.h b/include/drm/drm_gem_shmem_helper.h
index 235dc33127b9a..589f7bfe7506e 100644
--- a/include/drm/drm_gem_shmem_helper.h
+++ b/include/drm/drm_gem_shmem_helper.h
@@ -112,6 +112,7 @@ struct drm_gem_shmem_object *drm_gem_shmem_create(struct drm_device *dev, size_t
struct drm_gem_shmem_object *drm_gem_shmem_create_with_mnt(struct drm_device *dev,
size_t size,
struct vfsmount *gemfs);
+void drm_gem_shmem_release(struct drm_gem_shmem_object *shmem);
void drm_gem_shmem_free(struct drm_gem_shmem_object *shmem);

void drm_gem_shmem_put_pages_locked(struct drm_gem_shmem_object *shmem);
--
2.50.0