Re: [PATCH 1/3] pci: VPD access timeout increase

From: Matthew Wilcox
Date: Thu Sep 04 2008 - 12:11:45 EST


On Thu, Sep 04, 2008 at 03:19:46PM +0100, Ben Hutchings wrote:
> Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> > On Wed, Sep 03, 2008 at 03:57:13PM -0700, Stephen Hemminger wrote:
> > > Accessing the VPD area can take a long time. There are comments in the
> > > SysKonnect vendor driver that it can take up to 25ms. The existing vpd
> > > access code fails consistently on my hardware.
> >
> > Wow, that's slow. If you were to try to read all 32k, it'd take more
> > than three minutes! (I presume it doesn't actually have as much as 32k).
> >
> > > Change the access routines to:
> > > * use a mutex rather than spinning with IRQ's disabled and lock held
> > > * have a longer timeout
> > > * call schedule while spinning to provide some responsivness
> >
> > I agree with your approach, but have one minor comment:
> >
> > > - spin_lock_irq(&vpd->lock);
> > > + mutex_lock(&vpd->lock);
> >
> > This should be:
> >
> > + if (mutex_lock_interruptible(&vpd->lock))
> > + return -EINTR;
> [...]
>
> This is fine for the sysfs case, but not if this is called during device
> probe - we don't want signals to modprobe to break device initialisation,
> do we?

Probably only fatal signals -- in which case the if (signal_pending)
check should be a fatal_signal_pending() and mutex_lock_interruptible()
should be mutex_lock_killable().

OTOH, who's signalling modprobe to do anything other than die?

--
Matthew Wilcox Intel Open Source Technology Centre
"Bill, look, we understand that you're interested in selling us this
operating system, but compare it to ours. We can't possibly take such
a retrograde step."
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