[RFC PATCH v2 01/12] Add sys_hotplug.h for system device hotplug framework

[Rafael J. Wysocki]

On Monday, February 04, 2013 04:48:10 AM Greg KH wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 03, 2013 at 09:44:39PM +0100, Rafael J. Wysocki wrote:
> > > Yes, but those are just remove events and we can only see how destructive they
> > > were after the removal.  The point is to be able to figure out whether or not
> > > we *want* to do the removal in the first place.
> > > 
> > > Say you have a computing node which signals a hardware problem in a processor
> > > package (the container with CPU cores, memory, PCI host bridge etc.).  You
> > > may want to eject that package, but you don't want to kill the system this
> > > way.  So if the eject is doable, it is very much desirable to do it, but if it
> > > is not doable, you'd rather shut the box down and do the replacement afterward.
> > > That may be costly, however (maybe weeks of computations), so it should be
> > > avoided if possible, but not at the expense of crashing the box if the eject
> > > doesn't work out.
> > 
> > It seems to me that we could handle that with the help of a new flag, say
> > "no_eject", in struct device, a global mutex, and a function that will walk
> > the given subtree of the device hierarchy and check if "no_eject" is set for
> > any devices in there.  Plus a global "no_eject" switch, perhaps.
> 
> I think this will always be racy, or at worst, slow things down on
> normal device operations as you will always be having to grab this flag
> whenever you want to do something new.

I don't see why this particular scheme should be racy, at least I don't see any
obvious races in it (although I'm not that good at races detection in general,
admittedly).

Also, I don't expect that flag to be used for everything, just for things known
to seriously break if forcible eject is done.  That may be not precise enough,
so that's a matter of defining its purpose more precisely.

We can do something like that on the ACPI level (ie. introduce a no_eject flag
in struct acpi_device and provide an iterface for the layers above ACPI to
manipulate it) but then devices without ACPI namespace objects won't be
covered.  That may not be a big deal, though.

So say dev is about to be used for something incompatible with ejecting, so to
speak.  Then, one would do platform_lock_eject(dev), which would check if dev
has an ACPI handle and then take acpi_eject_lock (if so).  The return value of
platform_lock_eject(dev) would need to be checked to see if the device is not
gone.  If it returns success (0), one would do something to the device and
call platform_no_eject(dev) and then platform_unlock_eject(dev).

To clear no_eject one would just call platform_allow_to_eject(dev) that would
do all of the locking and clearing in one operation.

The ACPI eject side would be similar to the thing I described previously,
so it would (1) take acpi_eject_lock, (2) see if any struct acpi_device
involved has no_eject set and if not, then (3) do acpi_bus_trim(), (4)
carry out the eject and (5) release acpi_eject_lock.

Step (2) above might be optional, ie. if eject is forcible, we would just do
(3) etc. without (2).

The locking should prevent races from happening (and it should prevent two
ejects from happening at the same time too, which is not a bad thing by itself).

> See my comments earlier about pci hotplug and the design decisions there
> about "no eject" capabilities for why.

Well, I replied to that one too. :-)

Thanks,
Rafael


-- 
I speak only for myself.
Rafael J. Wysocki, Intel Open Source Technology Center.