Re: [PATCH v2 1/2] regulator: dummy: force synchronous probing

[Doug Anderson]

Hi,

On Tue, Mar 11, 2025 at 2:18 AM Christian Eggers <ceggers@xxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Sometimes I get a NULL pointer dereference at boot time in kobject_get()
> with the following call stack:
>
> anatop_regulator_probe()
>  devm_regulator_register()
>   regulator_register()
>    regulator_resolve_supply()
>     kobject_get()
>
> By placing some extra BUG_ON() statements I could verify that this is
> raised because probing of the 'dummy' regulator driver is not completed
> ('dummy_regulator_rdev' is still NULL).
>
> In the JTAG debugger I can see that dummy_regulator_probe() and
> anatop_regulator_probe() can be run by different kernel threads
> (kworker/u4:*).  I haven't further investigated whether this can be
> changed or if there are other possibilities to force synchronization
> between these two probe routines.  On the other hand I don't expect much
> boot time penalty by probing the 'dummy' regulator synchronously.
>
> Cc: stable@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Fixes: 259b93b21a9f ("regulator: Set PROBE_PREFER_ASYNCHRONOUS for drivers that existed in 4.14")
> Signed-off-by: Christian Eggers <ceggers@xxxxxxx>
> ---
> v2:
> - no changes
>
>  drivers/regulator/dummy.c | 2 +-
>  1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)

Not that it should really hurt, but do we need both commit
cfaf53cb472e ("regulator: check that dummy regulator has been probed
before using it") and this one? It seems like commit cfaf53cb472e
("regulator: check that dummy regulator has been probed before using
it") would be sufficient and we don't really need to force the
regulator to synchronous probing.

...not that I expect the dummy probing synchronously to be a big deal,
I just want to make sure I understand.

-Doug