[CFT] Hopefully fix PCMCIA boot deadlocks

Russell King (rmk@arm.linux.org.uk)
Mon, 14 Apr 2003 16:50:57 +0100


Ok,

Here's my latest patch against 2.5.67 which introduces a proper state
machine into the PCMCIA layer for handling the sockets. Unfortunately,
I fear that this isn't the answer for the following reasons:

* We create our own workqueue (which spawns N threads, one thread per CPU.)
We need to use a separate thread from the keventd since we call
PCI probe and remove methods from this thread, which are free to
use flush_scheduled_work() - which would be another deadlock waiting
to happen. I think we need to go to a per-socket thread instead.

* The state machine isn't as readable as it should be. To be quite frank,
I think it was a mistake to code it as a state machine - IMO its
completely unreadable.

* We allow cardbus cards to be suspended and reset as though they are
normal PCMCIA cards. Unfortunately, PCI drivers have no knowledge
that these operations occur. This also applies to older kernels, so
this isn't really a problem that's created by this patch.

This is even more true now that we have the capability to plug in a
complete (possibly complex) PCI bus structure.

* There seems to be a whole bunch of setup stuff going on in
pcmcia_register_client(). This is run each time a card device driver
is inserted by cardmgr. Although this has buggy for the case where
all drivers are built in, this patch makes it more buggy; if a card
is inserted at the time ds.ko is loaded, we kick off the asynchronous
state machine to process the card and carry on regardless.

However, we can not wait here - if we do wait for the state machine
to complete, we will hit the same deadlock in the device model which
we're hitting today.

It appears that it would mainly affect multi-function PCMCIA cards.
Unfortunately, I don't have any to test.

That said, it seems to work for me.

The patch can be found at

http://patches.arm.linux.org.uk/pcmcia/pcmcia-1.diff

Now, thing is, I can't test this patch on its own; I can test it on ARM
boxen with yenta cardbus bridges, or statically mapped PCMCIA-only
sockets, but the former requires several other patches to the PCMCIA
resource subsystem to be functional.

Hence I need other peoples feedback on this patch before I push it
Linus-wards.

-- 
Russell King (rmk@arm.linux.org.uk)                The developer of ARM Linux
             http://www.arm.linux.org.uk/personal/aboutme.html

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