linux/include
Logan Gunthorpe 233ed09d7f chardev: add helper function to register char devs with a struct device
Credit for this patch goes is shared with Dan Williams [1]. I've
taken things one step further to make the helper function more
useful and clean up calling code.

There's a common pattern in the kernel whereby a struct cdev is placed
in a structure along side a struct device which manages the life-cycle
of both. In the naive approach, the reference counting is broken and
the struct device can free everything before the chardev code
is entirely released.

Many developers have solved this problem by linking the internal kobjs
in this fashion:

cdev.kobj.parent = &parent_dev.kobj;

The cdev code explicitly gets and puts a reference to it's kobj parent.
So this seems like it was intended to be used this way. Dmitrty Torokhov
first put this in place in 2012 with this commit:

2f0157f char_dev: pin parent kobject

and the first instance of the fix was then done in the input subsystem
in the following commit:

4a215aa Input: fix use-after-free introduced with dynamic minor changes

Subsequently over the years, however, this issue seems to have tripped
up multiple developers independently. For example, see these commits:

0d5b7da iio: Prevent race between IIO chardev opening and IIO device
(by Lars-Peter Clausen in 2013)

ba0ef85 tpm: Fix initialization of the cdev
(by Jason Gunthorpe in 2015)

5b28dde [media] media: fix use-after-free in cdev_put() when app exits
after driver unbind
(by Shauh Khan in 2016)

This technique is similarly done in at least 15 places within the kernel
and probably should have been done so in another, at least, 5 places.
The kobj line also looks very suspect in that one would not expect
drivers to have to mess with kobject internals in this way.
Even highly experienced kernel developers can be surprised by this
code, as seen in [2].

To help alleviate this situation, and hopefully prevent future
wasted effort on this problem, this patch introduces a helper function
to register a char device along with its parent struct device.
This creates a more regular API for tying a char device to its parent
without the developer having to set members in the underlying kobject.

This patch introduce cdev_device_add and cdev_device_del which
replaces a common pattern including setting the kobj parent, calling
cdev_add and then calling device_add. It also introduces cdev_set_parent
for the few cases that set the kobject parent without using device_add.

[1] https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/2/13/700
[2] https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/2/10/370

Signed-off-by: Logan Gunthorpe <logang@deltatee.com>
Signed-off-by: Dan Williams <dan.j.williams@intel.com>
Reviewed-by: Hans Verkuil <hans.verkuil@cisco.com>
Reviewed-by: Alexandre Belloni <alexandre.belloni@free-electrons.com>
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
2017-03-21 06:44:32 +01:00
..
acpi Merge branches 'acpi-bus', 'acpi-sleep' and 'acpi-processor' 2017-02-20 14:28:03 +01:00
asm-generic mm: convert generic code to 5-level paging 2017-03-09 11:48:47 -08:00
clocksource
crypto crypto: api - Add crypto_requires_off helper 2017-02-27 18:09:39 +08:00
drm sched/headers: Prepare to remove the <linux/mm_types.h> dependency from <linux/sched.h> 2017-03-02 08:42:37 +01:00
dt-bindings scripts/spelling.txt: add "overide" pattern and fix typo instances 2017-03-09 17:01:09 -08:00
keys KEYS: Differentiate uses of rcu_dereference_key() and user_key_payload() 2017-03-02 10:09:00 +11:00
kvm
linux chardev: add helper function to register char devs with a struct device 2017-03-21 06:44:32 +01:00
math-emu
media media fixes for v4.11-rc2 2017-03-09 15:50:56 -08:00
memory
misc auxdisplay: charlcd: Add support for 4-bit interfaces 2017-03-17 15:10:49 +09:00
net scripts/spelling.txt: add "overide" pattern and fix typo instances 2017-03-09 17:01:09 -08:00
pcmcia
ras
rdma sched/headers: Prepare to remove <linux/cred.h> inclusion from <linux/sched.h> 2017-03-02 08:42:31 +01:00
rxrpc
scsi scsi: remove scsi_execute_req_flags 2017-02-23 16:57:36 -05:00
soc ARC updates for 4.11 rc1 2017-02-22 10:33:53 -08:00
sound sched/headers: Prepare to remove spurious <linux/sched.h> inclusion dependencies 2017-03-02 08:42:41 +01:00
target Merge branch 'WIP.sched-core-for-linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/tip/tip 2017-03-03 10:16:38 -08:00
trace There was some breakage with the changes for jump labels in the 4.11 merge 2017-03-07 09:37:28 -08:00
uapi pps: fix padding issue with PPS_FETCH for ioctl_compat 2017-03-17 15:10:49 +09:00
video
xen Merge branch 'stable/for-linus-4.11' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/konrad/swiotlb 2017-03-07 10:23:17 -08:00
Kbuild