Re: [PATCH] spi: bcm2835: do not unregister controller in shutdown handler

[Jason Gunthorpe]

On Mon, Oct 04, 2021 at 03:12:20PM +0100, Mark Brown wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 04, 2021 at 10:17:56AM -0300, Jason Gunthorpe wrote:
> 
> > Shutdown is supposed to quiet the HW so it is not doing DMAs any
> > more. This is basically an 'emergency' kind of path, the HW should be
> > violently stopped if available - ie clearing the bus master bits on
> > PCI, for instance.
> 
> > When something like kexec happens we need the machine to be in a state
> > where random DMA's are not corrupting memory.
> 
> That's all well and good but there's no point in implementing something
> half baked that's opening up a whole bunch of opportunities to crash the
> system if more work comes in after it's half broken the device setup.  

Well, that is up to the driver implementing this. It looks like device
shutdown is called before the userspace is all nuked so yes,
concurrency with userspace is a possible concern here.

> > Due to the emergency sort of nature it is not appropriate to do
> > locking complicated sorts of things like struct device unregistrations
> > here.
> 
> That's just not what's actually implemented in a bunch of places, nor
> something one would infer from the documentation ("Called at shut-down
> to quiesce the device", no mention of emergency cases which I'd guess
> would just be kdump) - 

Drivers mis understanding stuff is not new..

> that's a different thing and definitely abusing the API.  I would guess
> that a good proportion of people implementing it are more worried about
> clean system shutdown than they are about kdump.

The other important case is to get the device cleaned up enough to
pass back to firmware for platforms that use a firmware
shutdown/reboot path.

Jason