Re: [PATCH] tty: serial: samsung_tty: remove spinlock flags in interrupt handlers

[Krzysztof Kozlowski]

On 16/03/2021 10:02, Johan Hovold wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 15, 2021 at 07:12:12PM +0100, Krzysztof Kozlowski wrote:
>> Since interrupt handler is called with disabled local interrupts, there
>> is no need to use the spinlock primitives disabling interrupts as well.
> 
> This isn't generally true due to "threadirqs" and that can lead to
> deadlocks if the console code is called from hard irq context.
> 
> Now, this is *not* the case for this particular driver since it doesn't
> even bother to take the port lock in console_write(). That should
> probably be fixed instead.
> 
> See https://lore.kernel.org/r/X7kviiRwuxvPxC8O@localhost.

Thanks for the link, quite interesting! For one type of device we have
two interrupts (RX and TX) so I guess it's a valid point/risk. However
let me try to understand it more.

Assuming we had only one interrupt line, how this interrupt handler with
threadirqs could be called from hardirq context?

You wrote there:
> For console drivers this can even happen for the same interrupt as the
> generic interrupt code can call printk(), and so can any other handler
> that isn't threaded (e.g. hrtimers or explicit IRQF_NO_THREAD).

However I replaced here only interrupt handler's spin lock to non-irq.
This code path will be executed only when interrupt is masked therefore
for one interrupt line there is *no possibility of*:

-> s3c64xx_serial_handle_irq
   - interrupts are masked
   - s3c24xx_serial_tx_irq
     - spin_lock()
                       -> hrtimers or other IRQF_NO_THREAD
                          - console_write() or something
                            - s3c64xx_serial_handle_irq
                              - s3c24xx_serial_tx_irq
                                - spin_lock()


Best regards,
Krzysztof