Re: [PATCH v4 3/3] vt: fix console lock vs. kernfs s_active lock order

[Peter Hurley]

On 12/16/2014 10:10 AM, Daniel Vetter wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 16, 2014 at 4:00 PM, Peter Hurley <peter@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>> The fix will be anyway the same in principal even after Daniel's planned
>>> rework for fbcon/fbdev: not holding the console_lock while freeing the
>>> sysfs entries.
>>
>> Oh, I didn't know Daniel was planning to rework fbcon/fbdev.
> 
> I don't. I've tried, cried and failed, so maybe in my next live ;-)
> But what I've tried was "let's fix fbcon" which was probably a bit too
> ambigitous. Splitting the notifier chains should be a lot more doable
> (but still lots of work I guess). The problem is it's not just the
> notifier chain that's broken with fbcon, but a lot more things:
> - initial modeset is done while holding the console lock. Would be
> true even after we fix this, since it's done as part of the con setup
> done by con_register. We'd need to do the modeset upfront, before
> registering fbcon.
> - panic handling is a joke with drm drivers and fbdev emulation plus
> fbcon - there's way too many sleeps and way too much code in the
> fbcon+drm panic path for this to ever work reliably as is. Would need
> massive rework. One of the most glaring things is that we have about 3
> things that tried to set up fbcon on panic (drm fbdev emulation panic
> handler, console unblanking on panic and fbcon panic handling).

yep - vt + printk + console lock + fbcon/fbdev + drm helper + kms driver
is a total nightmare.

> It's imo unfixable overall, so my long term plan is to get rid of
> fbdev emulation, fbcon and all console_lock paths from kms drivers (we
> have that now with I915_FBDEV=n). And then provide consoles with
> userspace deamons (kmscon) and a very minimalistic crash-dump tooling
> for panic handling on bare-bones kms drivers (not yet there, but
> patches from David Herrmann are floating around).

Interesting, I'll have to look into that.

Regards,
Peter Hurleykmscon

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