From: Rafael J. Wysocki
Currently, there is a problem with taking functional dependencies
between devices into account.
What I mean by a "functional dependency" is when the driver of device
B needs device A to be functional and (generally) its driver to be
present in order to work properly. This has certain consequences
for power management (suspend/resume and runtime PM ordering) and
shutdown ordering of these devices. In general, it also implies that
the driver of A needs to be working for B to be probed successfully
and it cannot be unbound from the device before the B's driver.
Support for representing those functional dependencies between
devices is added here to allow the driver core to track them and act
on them in certain cases where applicable.
The argument for doing that in the driver core is that there are
quite a few distinct use cases involving device dependencies, they
are relatively hard to get right in a driver (if one wants to
address all of them properly) and it only gets worse if multiplied
by the number of drivers potentially needing to do it. Morever, at
least one case (asynchronous system suspend/resume) cannot be handled
in a single driver at all, because it requires the driver of A to
wait for B to suspend (during system suspend) and the driver of B to
wait for A to resume (during system resume).
For this reason, represent dependencies between devices as "links",
with the help of struct device_link objects each containing pointers
to the "linked" devices, a list node for each of them, status
information, flags, a lock and an RCU head for synchronization.
Also add two new list heads, links_to_consumers and links_to_suppliers,
to struct device to represent the lists of links to the devices that
depend on the given one (consumers) and to the devices depended on
by it (suppliers), respectively.
The entire data structure consisting of all of the lists of link
objects for all devices is protected by SRCU (for list walking)
and by a mutex (for link object addition/removal). In addition
to that, each link object has an internal status field whose
value reflects whether or not drivers are bound to the devices
pointed to by the link or probing/removal of their drivers is in
progress etc. That status field is protected by an internal
spinlock.
New links are added by calling device_link_add() which takes four
arguments: pointers to the devices in question, the initial status
of the link and flags. In particular, if DEVICE_LINK_STATELESS is
set in the flags, the link status is not to be taken into account
for this link and the driver core will not manage it. In turn, if
DEVICE_LINK_AUTOREMOVE is set in the flags, the driver core will
remove the link automatically when the consumer device driver
unbinds from it.
One of the actions carried out by device_link_add() is to reorder
the lists used for device shutdown and system suspend/resume to
put the consumer device along with all of its children and all of
its consumers (and so on, recursively) to the ends of those lists
in order to ensure the right ordering between all of the supplier
and consumer devices.
For this reason, it is not possible to create a link between two
devices if the would-be supplier device already depends on the
would-be consumer device as either a direct descendant of it or a
consumer of one of its direct descendants or one of its consumers
and so on.
It also is impossible to create a link between a parent and a child
device (in any direction).
There are two types of link objects, persistent and non-persistent.
The persistent ones stay around until one of the target devices is
deleted, while the non-persistent ones are removed automatically when
the consumer driver unbinds from its device (ie. they are assumed to
be valid only as long as the consumer device has a driver bound to
it). Persistent links are created by default and non-persistent
links are created when the DEVICE_LINK_AUTOREMOVE flag is passed
to device_link_add().
Both persistent and non-persistent device links can be deleted
explicitly with the help of device_link_del().
Links created without the DEVICE_LINK_STATELESS flag set are managed
by the driver core using a simple state machine. There are 5 states
each link can be in: DORMANT (unused), AVAILABLE (the supplier driver
is present and functional), CONSUMER_PROBE (the consumer driver is
probing), ACTIVE (both supplier and consumer drivers are present and
functional), and SUPPLIER_UNBIND (the supplier driver is unbinding).
The driver core updates the link state automatically depending on
what happens to the linked devices and for each link state specific
actions are taken in addition to that.
For example, if the supplier driver unbinds from its device, the
driver core will also unbind the drivers of all of its consumers
automatically under the assumption that they cannot function
properly without the supplier. Analogously, the driver core will
only allow the consumer driver to bind to
