Re: [PATCH v15 00/13] mux controller abstraction and iio/i2c muxes

[Luc Van Oostenryck]

On Sat, Jun 3, 2017 at 9:34 PM, Greg Kroah-Hartman
<gregkh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 03, 2017 at 08:37:21PM +0200, Luc Van Oostenryck wrote:
>> On Sat, Jun 3, 2017 at 12:26 PM, Greg Kroah-Hartman
>> <gregkh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> > On Sun, May 14, 2017 at 09:51:03PM +0200, Peter Rosin wrote:
>> >> From: Peter Rosin <peda@xxxxxxxxxx>
>> >>
>> >> Hi Greg,
>> >>
>> >> Philipp found problems in v14 with using a mutex for locking that was
>> >> the outcome of the review for v13, so I'm now using a semaphore instead
>> >> of the rwsem that was in v13. That at least got rid of the scary call
>> >> to downgrade_write. However, I'm still unsure about what you actually
>> >> meant with your comment about lack of sparse markings [1]. I did add
>> >> __must_check to the funcs that selects the mux, but I've got this
>> >> feeling that this is not what you meant?
>> >
>> > I thought there was a way to mark a function as requiring a lock be held
>> > when it is being called.  Does sparse not support that anymore?
>>
>> sparse still support these annotations, of course.
>> In this case, I suppose you're talking about '__must_hold()' which
>> *must* be used instead of a pair of '__releases()' + '__acquires()'
>> when the lock is help on function entry and exit.
>
> Ah, yes, that's what I was thinking of.  I don't know if sparse can
> track things like this across an exported symbol, so I doubt it really
> will help here.  Sorry for the noise.

No problem, I'm glad to help for sparse related things.

I didn't saw the code in question because the lkml.org link Peter
gave didn't work for me and I don't know much about exported symbols
(but I think the sole effect is to add some data in some symbol table).
But these annotations just work based on the declarations, very much
like type checking. So if you have something in scope like the following:

void do_stuff_locked(struct s *ptr) __must_hold(*ptr);

...

void do_stuff_unlocked(struct s *ptr)
{
        ...
        do_stuff_locked(ptr);        // will warn
        ...
}

You will have a warning from sparse unless the code preceding and following
the call to do_stuff_locked() lock & then unlock 'ptr', generaly
indirectly by a pair
of functions, the one before with an '__acquires()' in its declaration
the one after
with a '__releases()' in its declaration:

void lock_stuff(struct s *ptr) __acquires(*ptr);
void unlock_stuff(struct s *ptr) __releases(*ptr);

void do_stuff_unlocked(struct s *ptr)
{
        lock_stuff(ptr);
        do_stuff_locked(ptr);        // won't warn
        unlock_stuff(ptr);
}


Regards,
-- Luc