Re: [PATCH 0/6] leds: fix broken devres usage

[Johan Hovold]

On Mon, Jun 01, 2020 at 04:51:01PM +0300, Andy Shevchenko wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 1, 2020 at 4:42 PM Johan Hovold <johan@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > Several MFD child drivers register their class devices directly under
> > the parent device (about half of the MFD LED drivers do so).
> >
> > This means you cannot blindly do devres conversions so that
> > deregistration ends up being tied to the parent device, something which
> > leads to use-after-free on driver unbind when the class device is
> > released while still being registered (and, for example, oopses on later
> > parent MFD driver unbind or LED class callbacks, or resource leaks and
> > name clashes on child driver reload).
> 
> Shouldn't MFD take reference count for their children?

That's not the issue here. The child driver is allocating memory for the
class device (for example using devres), and that will end up being
freed on unbind while said device is still registered. The child driver
may then even be unloaded. No extra reference can fix this.

Johan