Re: Freeing of dev->p

[Jean Delvare]

Hi Greg,

On Fri, 10 Jan 2014 07:24:02 -0800, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 10, 2014 at 03:39:07PM +0100, Jean Delvare wrote:
> > + * @driver_data: Private pointer for driver specific info.  Will turn into a
> > + *		list soon.
> 
> Ah, this comment reminds me of why I originally did this.  I was working
> on moving for a way to have multiple drivers bound to the same device,
> as people needed that type of thing for something that I can't remember
> at the moment.

Presumably this was to handle multifunction devices. But now we have
the MFD infrastructure which deals with the problem gracefully, so
indeed there no longer is any point in making driver_data a list. The
second part of the comment above can go away.

> As it's been years now with no real movement forward on that idea, I
> guess it's not going to happen :)

Agreed, problem was simply solved differently.

> >   * @power:	For device power management.
> >   * 		See Documentation/power/devices.txt for details.
> >   * @pm_domain:	Provide callbacks that are executed during system suspend,
> > @@ -737,6 +739,8 @@ struct device {
> >  					   device */
> >  	void		*platform_data;	/* Platform specific data, device
> >  					   core doesn't touch it */
> > +	void		*driver_data;	/* Driver data, set and get with
> > +					   dev_set/get_drvdata */
> >  	struct dev_pm_info	power;
> >  	struct dev_pm_domain	*pm_domain;
> >  
> > 
> > For performance I'd even question the point of the dev check in
> > dev_get_drvdata(), especially when there is no such check in
> > dev_set_drvdata() which presumably is always called first.
> 
> It's nice to not oops if a NULL pointer is passed in :)

Or not. Is there any case where passing NULL could be desirable? If not
and passing NULL is always going to be a bug (which I think is the
case) then a oops is the right answer to bogus code. This ensure the
bug will be caught and fixed early. Not oopsing here most certainly
means oopsing at the next line in the driver anyway when it tries to
access the driver data and certainly doesn't expect it to be NULL
either.

> > Plus dev_set_drvdata() can no longer fail (something only 3 drivers in
> > the whole kernel tree were checking for anyway) so it could return
> > void instead of int.
> 
> True.
> 
> > Then I suppose we could inline both functions
> > again, for performance. Well, put in short, really revering
> > b4028437876866aba4747a655ede00f892089e14 would be the way to go IMHO.
> 
> Almost, the copyright lines should stay :)

As you wish :)

> > Really, while I understand your envy to protect driver core internals
> > from unwanted access, the cost here was simply too high IMHO, both in
> > terms of getting things right and performance. Some drivers are calling
> > dev_get_drvdata() directly or indirectly repeatedly at run-time. They
> > had no reason not to as this used to be so fast, and now it is no
> > longer an inline function, it has conditionals and a double pointer
> > indirection...
> > 
> > Plus, I can't think of anything really bad that could result from
> > accessing driver_data directly, contrary to the other members of struct
> > device_private.
> 
> See first response above for why I did this, it wasn't to just make
> things "harder" to mess up, I actually had a reason to do it (imagine
> that!)

Shocking! :D

> Thanks for the detailed response, I think I'll just revert most of that
> patch and see if it's still workable.

Sounds like a good plan, yeah.

Thanks,
-- 
Jean Delvare
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