1 Devres - Managed Device Resource
2 ================================
4 Tejun Heo <teheo@suse.de>
6 First draft 10 January 2007
9 1. Intro : Huh? Devres?
10 2. Devres : Devres in a nutshell
11 3. Devres Group : Group devres'es and release them together
12 4. Details : Life time rules, calling context, ...
13 5. Overhead : How much do we have to pay for this?
14 6. List of managed interfaces : Currently implemented managed interfaces
20 devres came up while trying to convert libata to use iomap. Each
21 iomapped address should be kept and unmapped on driver detach. For
22 example, a plain SFF ATA controller (that is, good old PCI IDE) in
23 native mode makes use of 5 PCI BARs and all of them should be
26 As with many other device drivers, libata low level drivers have
27 sufficient bugs in ->remove and ->probe failure path. Well, yes,
28 that's probably because libata low level driver developers are lazy
29 bunch, but aren't all low level driver developers? After spending a
30 day fiddling with braindamaged hardware with no document or
31 braindamaged document, if it's finally working, well, it's working.
33 For one reason or another, low level drivers don't receive as much
34 attention or testing as core code, and bugs on driver detach or
35 initialization failure don't happen often enough to be noticeable.
36 Init failure path is worse because it's much less travelled while
37 needs to handle multiple entry points.
39 So, many low level drivers end up leaking resources on driver detach
40 and having half broken failure path implementation in ->probe() which
41 would leak resources or even cause oops when failure occurs. iomap
42 adds more to this mix. So do msi and msix.
48 devres is basically linked list of arbitrarily sized memory areas
49 associated with a struct device. Each devres entry is associated with
50 a release function. A devres can be released in several ways. No
51 matter what, all devres entries are released on driver detach. On
52 release, the associated release function is invoked and then the
53 devres entry is freed.
55 Managed interface is created for resources commonly used by device
56 drivers using devres. For example, coherent DMA memory is acquired
57 using dma_alloc_coherent(). The managed version is called
58 dmam_alloc_coherent(). It is identical to dma_alloc_coherent() except
59 for the DMA memory allocated using it is managed and will be
60 automatically released on driver detach. Implementation looks like
66 dma_addr_t dma_handle;
69 static void dmam_coherent_release(struct device *dev, void *res)
71 struct dma_devres *this = res;
73 dma_free_coherent(dev, this->size, this->vaddr, this->dma_handle);
76 dmam_alloc_coherent(dev, size, dma_handle, gfp)
78 struct dma_devres *dr;
81 dr = devres_alloc(dmam_coherent_release, sizeof(*dr), gfp);
84 /* alloc DMA memory as usual */
85 vaddr = dma_alloc_coherent(...);
88 /* record size, vaddr, dma_handle in dr */
97 If a driver uses dmam_alloc_coherent(), the area is guaranteed to be
98 freed whether initialization fails half-way or the device gets
99 detached. If most resources are acquired using managed interface, a
100 driver can have much simpler init and exit code. Init path basically
101 looks like the following.
107 d = devm_kzalloc(dev, sizeof(*d), GFP_KERNEL);
111 d->ring = dmam_alloc_coherent(...);
119 return register_to_upper_layer(d);
126 unregister_from_upper_layer(d);
127 shutdown_my_hardware();
130 As shown above, low level drivers can be simplified a lot by using
131 devres. Complexity is shifted from less maintained low level drivers
132 to better maintained higher layer. Also, as init failure path is
133 shared with exit path, both can get more testing.
135 Note though that when converting current calls or assignments to
136 managed devm_* versions it is up to you to check if internal operations
137 like allocating memory, have failed. Managed resources pertains to the
138 freeing of these resources *only* - all other checks needed are still
139 on you. In some cases this may mean introducing checks that were not
140 necessary before moving to the managed devm_* calls.
146 Devres entries can be grouped using devres group. When a group is
147 released, all contained normal devres entries and properly nested
148 groups are released. One usage is to rollback series of acquired
149 resources on failure. For example,
151 if (!devres_open_group(dev, NULL, GFP_KERNEL))
163 devres_remove_group(dev, NULL);
167 devres_release_group(dev, NULL);
170 As resource acquisition failure usually means probe failure, constructs
171 like above are usually useful in midlayer driver (e.g. libata core
172 layer) where interface function shouldn't have side effect on failure.
173 For LLDs, just returning error code suffices in most cases.
175 Each group is identified by void *id. It can either be explicitly
176 specified by @id argument to devres_open_group() or automatically
177 created by passing NULL as @id as in the above example. In both
178 cases, devres_open_group() returns the group's id. The returned id
179 can be passed to other devres functions to select the target group.
180 If NULL is given to those functions, the latest open group is
183 For example, you can do something like the following.
185 int my_midlayer_create_something()
187 if (!devres_open_group(dev, my_midlayer_create_something, GFP_KERNEL))
192 devres_close_group(dev, my_midlayer_create_something);
196 void my_midlayer_destroy_something()
198 devres_release_group(dev, my_midlayer_create_something);
205 Lifetime of a devres entry begins on devres allocation and finishes
206 when it is released or destroyed (removed and freed) - no reference
209 devres core guarantees atomicity to all basic devres operations and
210 has support for single-instance devres types (atomic
211 lookup-and-add-if-not-found). Other than that, synchronizing
212 concurrent accesses to allocated devres data is caller's
213 responsibility. This is usually non-issue because bus ops and
214 resource allocations already do the job.
216 For an example of single-instance devres type, read pcim_iomap_table()
219 All devres interface functions can be called without context if the
220 right gfp mask is given.
226 Each devres bookkeeping info is allocated together with requested data
227 area. With debug option turned off, bookkeeping info occupies 16
228 bytes on 32bit machines and 24 bytes on 64bit (three pointers rounded
229 up to ull alignment). If singly linked list is used, it can be
230 reduced to two pointers (8 bytes on 32bit, 16 bytes on 64bit).
232 Each devres group occupies 8 pointers. It can be reduced to 6 if
233 singly linked list is used.
235 Memory space overhead on ahci controller with two ports is between 300
236 and 400 bytes on 32bit machine after naive conversion (we can
237 certainly invest a bit more effort into libata core layer).
240 6. List of managed interfaces
241 -----------------------------
246 devm_clk_hw_register()
247 devm_of_clk_add_hw_provider()
250 dmaenginem_async_device_register()
251 dmam_alloc_coherent()
253 dmam_declare_coherent_memory()
260 devm_gpiod_get_index()
261 devm_gpiod_get_index_optional()
262 devm_gpiod_get_optional()
265 devm_gpiochip_add_data()
267 devm_gpio_request_one()
271 devm_iio_device_alloc()
272 devm_iio_device_free()
273 devm_iio_device_register()
274 devm_iio_device_unregister()
275 devm_iio_kfifo_allocate()
276 devm_iio_kfifo_free()
277 devm_iio_triggered_buffer_setup()
278 devm_iio_triggered_buffer_cleanup()
279 devm_iio_trigger_alloc()
280 devm_iio_trigger_free()
281 devm_iio_trigger_register()
282 devm_iio_trigger_unregister()
283 devm_iio_channel_get()
284 devm_iio_channel_release()
285 devm_iio_channel_get_all()
286 devm_iio_channel_release_all()
289 devm_input_allocate_device()
292 devm_release_mem_region()
293 devm_release_region()
294 devm_release_resource()
295 devm_request_mem_region()
296 devm_request_region()
297 devm_request_resource()
303 devm_ioremap_nocache()
305 devm_ioremap_resource() : checks resource, requests memory region, ioremaps
308 pcim_iomap_regions() : do request_region() and iomap() on multiple BARs
309 pcim_iomap_table() : array of mapped addresses indexed by BAR
314 devm_request_any_context_irq()
316 devm_request_threaded_irq()
317 devm_irq_alloc_descs()
318 devm_irq_alloc_desc()
319 devm_irq_alloc_desc_at()
320 devm_irq_alloc_desc_from()
321 devm_irq_alloc_descs_from()
322 devm_irq_alloc_generic_chip()
323 devm_irq_setup_generic_chip()
327 devm_led_classdev_register()
328 devm_led_classdev_unregister()
332 devm_mdiobus_alloc_size()
337 devm_get_free_pages()
349 devm_mfd_add_devices()
352 devm_mux_chip_alloc()
353 devm_mux_chip_register()
354 devm_mux_control_get()
361 devm_pci_alloc_host_bridge() : managed PCI host bridge allocation
362 devm_pci_remap_cfgspace() : ioremap PCI configuration space
363 devm_pci_remap_cfg_resource() : ioremap PCI configuration space resource
364 pcim_enable_device() : after success, all PCI ops become managed
365 pcim_pin_device() : keep PCI device enabled after release
374 devm_pinctrl_register()
375 devm_pinctrl_unregister()
378 devm_reboot_mode_register()
379 devm_reboot_mode_unregister()
386 devm_regulator_bulk_get()
389 devm_regulator_register()
392 devm_reset_control_get()
393 devm_reset_controller_register()
396 devm_serdev_device_open()
399 devm_acpi_dma_controller_register()
402 devm_spi_register_master()
405 devm_watchdog_register_device()