Re: [driver-core PATCH v6 6/9] driver core: Probe devices asynchronously instead of the driver

[Dan Williams]

On Thu, Nov 8, 2018 at 10:07 AM Alexander Duyck
<alexander.h.duyck@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Probe devices asynchronously instead of the driver. This results in us
> seeing the same behavior if the device is registered before the driver or
> after. This way we can avoid serializing the initialization should the
> driver not be loaded until after the devices have already been added.
>
> The motivation behind this is that if we have a set of devices that
> take a significant amount of time to load we can greatly reduce the time to
> load by processing them in parallel instead of one at a time. In addition,
> each device can exist on a different node so placing a single thread on one
> CPU to initialize all of the devices for a given driver can result in poor
> performance on a system with multiple nodes.

Do you have numbers on effects of this change individually? Is this
change necessary for the libnvdimm init speedup, or is it independent?

> I am using the driver_data member of the device struct to store the driver
> pointer while we wait on the deferred probe call. This should be safe to do
> as the value will either be set to NULL on a failed probe or driver load
> followed by unload, or the driver value itself will be set on a successful
> driver load. In addition I have used the async_probe flag to add additional
> protection as it will be cleared if someone overwrites the driver_data
> member as a part of loading the driver.

I would not put it past a device-driver to call dev_get_drvdata()
before dev_set_drvdata(), to check "has this device already been
initialized". So I don't think it is safe to assume that the core can
stash this information in ->driver_data. Why not put this
infrastructure in struct device_private?