On Mon, Sep 8, 2014 at 6:47 PM, Tejun Heo <t...@kernel.org> wrote: > Hello, > > On Mon, Sep 08, 2014 at 06:38:34PM -0700, Luis R. Rodriguez wrote: >> OK then one only concern I would have with this is that the presence >> of such a flag doesn't necessarily mean that all drivers on a system >> have been tested for asynch probe yet. I'd feel much more comfortable > > Given that the behvaior change is from driver core and that device > probing can happen post-loading anyway,
Ah but lets not forget Dmitry's requirement which is for in-kernel drivers. We'd need to deal with both built-in and modules. Dmitry's case is completely orthogonal to the systemd issue and is just needed to help not stall boot but I see no reason to blend these two issues into one requirement together. > I don't think we need to worry > about drivers breaking from probing made asynchronous to loading. The > problem is the expectation of the entity which initiated loading of > the module. If it's depending on device being probed synchronously > but insmod returns before that, it can break things. We probably > should audit request_module() users and see which ones expect such > behavior. Sure. Based on a quick glance I see sloppy uses of this, this should probably be fixed anyway. >> if this global flag allowed say specific drivers that *did* have such >> a bool enabled, for example. Then that would enable synchronous >> behaviour for the kernel by default, require the flag for enabling the >> new async feature but only for drivers that have been tested. > > If we're gonna do the global switch, I personally think the right > approach is blacklisting instead of the other way around because each > specific driver doesn't really have much to do with it and the > exceptions are about specific use cases that we don't have a good way > to identify them from module loading path. OK sure... even if we did whitelist I'm afraid such a white list might be subjective in terms of design to specific systems anyway... I suppose the only real way to do it right is to push and strive towards a full system whitelist and address the black list as you mention. In terms of approach we would still need to decide on a path for how to do asynch probing for both in-kernel drivers and modules, do we want async_schedule(), or queue_work()? If async_schedule() do we want to use a new domain or a new one shared for all drivers? Priority on the schedular was one of my other concerns which we'd need to make right to match existing load on drivers through finit_module() and synchronous probe. >> That also still would not technically solve the issue of the current >> existence of the timeout, unless of course we wish to ask systemd to >> only make the timeout take effect *iff* the global sysctl flag / >> whatever was enabled. > > Userland could backport a fix to set the sysctl. Given that we need > both synchrnous and asynchronous behaviors, it's unlikely that we can > come up with a solution which doesn't need cooperation from userland. True and then the timeout would also have to be skipped for device drivers that have the sync_probe flag set, so I guess we'd need to expose that too. I'm not too sure if systemd is equipped to be happy with no timeout on module loading based previous discussions [0] so we'd need to ensure we're all in agreement there that such drivers exist and we may need *something*, if at the very least a really long fucking timeout (TM) for such drivers. [0] http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/2014-August/021852.html Luis -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-scsi" in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
