On Sat, Jul 8, 2017 at 12:39 AM, Cong Wang <xiyou.wangc...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 6, 2017 at 7:24 AM, Jason A. Donenfeld <ja...@zx2c4.com> wrote:
>> list_add(&priv->list, &list_of_things);
>>
>> ret = register_netdevice(); // if ret is < 0, then destruct above is
>> automatically called
>>
>> // RACE WITH LIST_ADD/LIST_DEL!! It's impossible to call list_add
>> only after
>> // things are brought up successfully. This is problematic.
>>
>> if (!ret)
>> pr_info("Yay it worked!\n");
>
> I fail to understand what you mean by RACE here.
>
> Here you should already have RTNL lock, so it can't race with any other
> newlink() calls. In fact you can't acquire RTNL lock in your destructor
> since register_netdevice() already gets it. Perhaps you mean
> netdev_run_todo() calls it without RTNL lock?
>
> I don't know why you reorder the above list_add(), you can order it
> as it was before, aka, call it after register_netdevice(), but you have to
> init the priv->list now for the list_del() on error path.
The race is that there's a state in which priv->list is part of
list_of_things before the interface is actually successfully setup and
ready to go.
And no, it's not possible to order it _after_ register_netdevice,
since register_netdevice might call priv_destructor, and
priv_destructor calls list_del, so if it's not already on the list,
we'll OOPS. In otherwords, API problem.
To work around this shortcoming, I'm actually just assigning
dev->priv_device *after* a successful call to register_netdevice. This
seems to be working well and allows me to retain ± the old behavior.
Hopefully this is an okay way to go about things?
Jason
