On Thu, 27 Feb 2025 at 11:34, John Hubbard <jhubbard@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On Wed Feb 26, 2025 at 5:02 PM PST, Greg KH wrote:
> > On Wed, Feb 26, 2025 at 07:47:30PM -0400, Jason Gunthorpe wrote:
> >> The way misc device works you can't unload the module until all the
> >> FDs are closed and the misc code directly handles races with opening
> >> new FDs while modules are unloading. It is quite a different scheme
> >> than discussed in this thread.
> >
> > And I would argue that is it the _right_ scheme to be following overall
> > here. Removing modules with in-flight devices/drivers is to me is odd,
> > and only good for developers doing work, not for real systems, right?
>
> Right...I think. I'm not experienced with misc, but I do know that the
> "run driver code after driver release" is very, very concerning.
>
> I'm quite new to drivers/gpu/drm, so this is the first time I've learned
> about this DRM behavior...
> >
> > Yes, networking did add that functionality to allow modules to be
> > unloaded with network connections open, and I'm guessing RDMA followed
> > that, but really, why?
> >
> > What is the requirement that means that you have to do this for function
> > pointers? I can understand the disconnect issue between devices and
> > drivers and open file handles (or sockets), as that is a normal thing,
> > but not removing code from the system, that is not normal.
> >
>
> I really hope that this "run after release" is something that Rust for
> Linux drivers, and in particular, the gpu/nova*, gpu/drm/nova* drivers,
> can *leave behind*.
>
> DRM may have had ${reasons} for this approach, but this nova effort is
> rebuilding from the ground up. So we should avoid just blindly following
> this aspect of the original DRM design.
>
nova is just a drm driver, it's not a rewrite of the drm subsystem,
that sort of effort would entail a much larger commitment.
DRM has reasons for doing what drm does, that is a separate discussion
of how a rust driver fits into the DRM. The rust code has to conform
to the C expectations for the subsystems they are fitting into.
The drm has spent years moving things to devm/drmm type constructs,
adding hotplug with the unplug mechanisms, but it's a long journey and
certainly not something nova would want to wait to reconstruct from
scratch.
Dave.
