devlink: remove the registration guarantee of references

The objective of exposing the devlink instance locks to
drivers was to let them use these locks to prevent user space
from accessing the device before it's fully initialized.
This is difficult because devlink_unregister() waits for all
references to be released, meaning that devlink_unregister()
can't itself be called under the instance lock.

To avoid this issue devlink_register() was moved after subobject
registration a while ago. Unfortunately the netdev paths get
a hold of the devlink instances _before_ they are registered.
Ideally netdev should wait for devlink init to finish (synchronizing
on the instance lock). This can't work because we don't know if the
instance will _ever_ be registered (in case of failures it may not).
The other option of returning an error until devlink_register()
is called is unappealing (user space would get a notification
netdev exist but would have to wait arbitrary amount of time
before accessing some of its attributes).

Weaken the guarantees of the devlink references.

Holding a reference will now only guarantee that the memory
of the object is around. Another way of looking at it is that
the reference now protects the object not its "registered" status.
Use devlink instance lock to synchronize unregistration.

This implies that releasing of the "main" reference of the devlink
instance moves from devlink_unregister() to devlink_free().

Reviewed-by: Jacob Keller <jacob.e.keller@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Jakub Kicinski <kuba@kernel.org>
Reviewed-by: Jiri Pirko <jiri@nvidia.com>
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>

1 files changed, 2 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/include/net/devlink.h b/include/net/devlink.h
index 6a2e4f21779f..425ecef431b7 100644
--- a/include/net/devlink.h
+++ b/include/net/devlink.h
@@ -1647,6 +1647,8 @@ static inline struct devlink *devlink_alloc(const struct devlink_ops *ops,
 	return devlink_alloc_ns(ops, priv_size, &init_net, dev);
 }
 void devlink_set_features(struct devlink *devlink, u64 features);
+int devl_register(struct devlink *devlink);
+void devl_unregister(struct devlink *devlink);
 void devlink_register(struct devlink *devlink);
 void devlink_unregister(struct devlink *devlink);
 void devlink_free(struct devlink *devlink);