Re: [PATCH v1 1/1] Revert "pinctrl: avoid unsafe code pattern in find_pinctrl()"

[Dmitry Torokhov]

On Wed, Oct 18, 2023 at 08:01:23AM +0300, Andy Shevchenko wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 17, 2023 at 02:43:01PM -0700, Dmitry Torokhov wrote:
> > On Tue, Oct 17, 2023 at 10:45:39PM +0300, Andy Shevchenko wrote:
> 
> Thanks for your response.
> 
> ...
> 
> > I wonder, could you please post entire dmesg for your system?
> 
> Working, non-working or both?

Non working, especially if you also enable debug logs in
drivers/mmc/host/sdhci-pci-core.c.

What I do not quite understand is that I think we should not be hitting
the case where pinctrl is already created for the device, which is the
code path my patch was changing. IIUIC we should be mostly executing the
"pinctrl not found" path and that did not really change. Maybe you could
also put some more annotations to show how/at what exact point the probe
order changed? Maybe log find_pinctrl() calls and compare?

Linus, BTW, I think there are more problems there with pinctrl lookup,
because, if we assume there are concurrent accesses to pinctrl_get(),
the fact that we did not find an instance while scanning the list does
not mean we will not find it when we go to insert a newly created one.

Another problem, as far as I can see, that there is not really a defined
owner of pinctrl structure, it is created on demand, and destroyed when
last user is gone. So if we execute last pintctrl_put() and there is
another pinctrl_get() running simultaneously, we may get and bump up the
refcount, and then release (pinctrl_free) will acquire the mutex, and
zap the structure.

Given that there are more issues in that code, maybe we should revert
the patch for now so Andy has a chance to convert to UUID/LABEL booting?

> 
> ...
> 
> > I think the right answer is "fix the userspace" really in this case. We
> > could also try extend of_alias_get_id() to see if we could pass some
> > preferred numbering on x86. But this will again be fragile if the
> > knowledge resides in the driver and is not tied to a particular board
> > (as it is in DT case): there could be multiple controllers, things will
> > be shifting board to board...
> 
> Any suggestion how should it be properly done in the minimum shell environment?
> (Busybox uses mdev with static tables IIRC and there is no fancy udev or so)

I'm not sure, so you have something like blkid running? You just need to
locate the device and chroot there. This assumes you do have initramfs.

Thanks.

-- 
Dmitry