6104c37094
There's a bunch of folks who're trying to make printk less contended and faster, but there's a problem: printk uses the console_lock, and the console lock has become the BKL for all things fbdev/fbcon, which in turn pulled in half the drm subsystem under that lock. That's awkward. There reasons for that is probably just a historical accident: - fbcon is a runtime option of fbdev, i.e. at runtime you can pick whether your fbdev driver instances are used as kernel consoles. Unfortunately this wasn't implemented with some module option, but through some module loading magic: As long as you don't load fbcon.ko, there's no fbdev console support, but loading it (in any order wrt fbdev drivers) will create console instances for all fbdev drivers. - This was implemented through a notifier chain. fbcon.ko enumerates all fbdev instances at load time and also registers itself as listener in the fbdev notifier. The fbdev core tries to register new fbdev instances with fbcon using the notifier. - On top of that the modifier chain is also used at runtime by the fbdev subsystem to e.g. control backlights for panels. - The problem is that the notifier puts a mutex locking context between fbdev and fbcon, which mixes up the locking contexts for both the runtime usage and the register time usage to notify fbcon. And at runtime fbcon (through the fbdev core) might call into the notifier from a printk critical section while console_lock is held. - This means console_lock must be an outer lock for the entire fbdev subsystem, which also means it must be acquired when registering a new framebuffer driver as the outermost lock since we might call into fbcon (through the notifier) which would result in a locking inversion if fbcon would acquire the console_lock from its notifier callback (which it needs to register the console). - console_lock can be held anywhere, since printk can be called anywhere, and through the above story, plus drm/kms being an fbdev driver, we pull in a shocking amount of locking hiercharchy underneath the console_lock. Which makes cleaning up printk really hard (not even splitting console_lock into an rwsem is all that useful due to this). There's various ways to address this, but the cleanest would be to make fbcon a compile-time option, where fbdev directly calls the fbcon register functions from register_framebuffer, or dummy static inline versions if fbcon is disabled. Maybe augmented with a runtime knob to disable fbcon, if that's needed (for debugging perhaps). But this could break some users who rely on the magic "loading fbcon.ko enables/disables fbdev framebuffers at runtime" thing, even if that's unlikely. Hence we must be careful: 1. Create a compile-time dependency between fbcon and fbdev in the least minimal way. This is what this patch does. 2. Wait at least 1 year to give possible users time to scream about how we broke their setup. Unlikely, since all distros make fbcon compile-in, and embedded platforms only compile stuff they know they need anyway. But still. 3. Convert the notifier to direct functions calls, with dummy static inlines if fbcon is disabled. We'll still need the fb notifier for the other uses (like backlights), but we can probably move it into the fb core (atm it must be built-into vmlinux). 4. Push console_lock down the call-chain, until it is down in console_register again. 5. Finally start to clean up and rework the printk/console locking. For context of this saga see commit |
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| README | ||
Linux kernel ============ This file was moved to Documentation/admin-guide/README.rst Please notice that there are several guides for kernel developers and users. These guides can be rendered in a number of formats, like HTML and PDF. In order to build the documentation, use ``make htmldocs`` or ``make pdfdocs``. There are various text files in the Documentation/ subdirectory, several of them using the Restructured Text markup notation. See Documentation/00-INDEX for a list of what is contained in each file. Please read the Documentation/process/changes.rst file, as it contains the requirements for building and running the kernel, and information about the problems which may result by upgrading your kernel.