• Guenter Roeck's avatar
    watchdog: Separate and maintain variables based on variable lifetime · b4ffb190
    Guenter Roeck authored
    All variables required by the watchdog core to manage a watchdog are
    currently stored in struct watchdog_device. The lifetime of those
    variables is determined by the watchdog driver. However, the lifetime
    of variables used by the watchdog core differs from the lifetime of
    struct watchdog_device. To remedy this situation, watchdog drivers
    can implement ref and unref callbacks, to be used by the watchdog
    core to lock struct watchdog_device in memory.
    
    While this solves the immediate problem, it depends on watchdog drivers
    to actually implement the ref/unref callbacks. This is error prone,
    often not implemented in the first place, or not implemented correctly.
    
    To solve the problem without requiring driver support, split the variables
    in struct watchdog_device into two data structures - one for variables
    associated with the watchdog driver, one for variables associated with
    the watchdog core. With this approach, the watchdog core can keep track
    of its variable lifetime and no longer depends on ref/unref callbacks
    in the driver. As a side effect, some of the variables originally in
    struct watchdog_driver are now private to the watchdog core and no longer
    visible in watchdog drivers.
    
    As a side effect of the changes made, an ioctl will now always fail
    with -ENODEV after a watchdog device was unregistered with the character
    device still open. Previously, it would only fail with -ENODEV in some
    situations. Also, ioctl operations are now atomic from driver perspective.
    With this change, it is now guaranteed that the driver will not unregister
    a watchdog between a timeout change and the subsequent ping.
    
    The 'ref' and 'unref' callbacks in struct watchdog_driver are no longer
    used and marked as deprecated.
    Signed-off-by: default avatarGuenter Roeck <linux@roeck-us.net>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarWim Van Sebroeck <wim@iguana.be>
    b4ffb190
watchdog-kernel-api.txt 11.3 KB