Re: [PATCHv2 0/7] Support inhibiting input devices

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Hi,

On 5/19/20 11:02 AM, Andrzej Pietrasiewicz wrote:
Hi Hans, Hi Dmitry,

W dniu 18.05.2020 o 16:23, Hans de Goede pisze:
Hi,

<snip>


So I wonder what this series actually adds for functionality for
userspace which can not already be achieved this way?

I also noticed that you keep the device open (do not call the
input_device's close callback) when inhibited and just throw away

I'm not sure if I understand you correctly, it is called:

+static inline void input_stop(struct input_dev *dev)
+{
+    if (dev->poller)
+        input_dev_poller_stop(dev->poller);
+    if (dev->close)
+        dev->close(dev);
                 ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
+static int input_inhibit(struct input_dev *dev)
+{
+    int ret = 0;
+
+    mutex_lock(&dev->mutex);
+
+    if (dev->inhibited)
+        goto out;
+
+    if (dev->users) {
+        if (dev->inhibit) {
+            ret = dev->inhibit(dev);
+            if (ret)
+                goto out;
+        }
+        input_stop(dev);
                 ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

It will not be called when dev->users is zero, but if it is zero,
then nobody has opened the device yet so there is nothing to close.

Ah, I missed that.

So if the device implements the inhibit call back then on
inhibit it will get both the inhibit and close callback called?


That's right. And conversely, upon uninhibit open() and uninhibit()
callbacks will be invoked. Please note that just as with open()/close(),
providing inhibit()/uninhibit() is optional.

Ack.

And what happens if the last user goes away and the device
is not inhibited?

close() is called as usually.

But not inhibit, hmm, see below.

I'm trying to understand here what the difference between the 2
is / what the goal of having a separate inhibit callback ?


Drivers have very different ideas about what it means to suspend/resume
and open/close. The optional inhibit/uninhibit callbacks are meant for
the drivers to know that it is this particular action going on.

So the inhibit() callback triggers the "suspend" behavior ?
But shouldn't drivers which are capable of suspending the device
always do so on close() ?

Since your current proposal also calls close() on inhibit() I
really see little difference between an inhibit() and the last
user of the device closing it and IMHO unless there is a good
reason to actually differentiate the 2 it would be better
to only stick with the existing close() and in cases where
that does not put the device in a low-power mode yet, fix
the existing close() callback to do the low-power mode
setting instead of adding a new callback.

For inhibit() there's one more argument: close() does not return a value,
so its meaning is "do some last cleanup" and as such it is not allowed
to fail - whatever its effect is, we must deem it successful. inhibit()
does return a value and so it is allowed to fail.

Well, we could make close() return an error and at least in the inhibit()
case propagate that to userspace. I wonder if userspace is going to
do anything useful with that error though...

In my experience errors during cleanup/shutdown are best logged
(using dev_err) and otherwise ignored, so that we try to clean up
as much possible. Unless the very first step of the shutdown process
fails the device is going to be in some twilight zone state anyways
at this point we might as well try to cleanup as much as possible.

What you say makes sense to me.
@Dmitry?


All in all, it is up to the drivers to decide which callback they
provide. Based on my work so far I would say that there are tens
of simple cases where open() and close() are sufficient, out of total
~400 users of input_allocate_device():

$ git grep "input_allocate_device(" | grep -v ^Documentation | \
cut -f1 -d: | sort | uniq | wc
     390     390   13496

So can you explain a bit more about the cases where only having
open/close is not sufficient?  So far I have the feeling that
those are all we need and that we really do not need separate
[un]inhibit callbacks.

My primary concern was not being able to propagate inhibit() error
to userspace, and then if we have inhibit(), uninhibit() should be
there for completeness. If propagating the error to userspace can
be neglected then yes, it seems open/close should be sufficient,
even more because the real meaning of "open" is "prepare the device
for generating input events".

To validate the idea of not introducing inhibit()/uninhibit() callbacks
to implement device inhibiting/uninhibiting let's look at
drivers/input/mouse/elan_i2c_core.c (PATCH 7/7):

static int elan_inhibit(struct input_dev *input)
{
[...]

     ret = mutex_lock_interruptible(&data->sysfs_mutex);
     if (ret)
         return ret;

     disable_irq(client->irq);

     ret = elan_disable_power(data);
     if (ret)
         enable_irq(client->irq);
[...]
}

First, close() does not exist in this driver. Of course this can be
fixed. Then it doesn't return a value. Then, if either taking the
mutex or disabling the power fails, the close() is still deemed
successful. Is it ok?

Note I also mentioned another solution for the error propagation,
which would require a big "flag day" commit adding "return 0"
to all existing close callbacks, but otherwise should work for your
purposes:

> Well, we could make close() return an error and at least in the inhibit()
> case propagate that to userspace. I wonder if userspace is going to
> do anything useful with that error though...

And I guess we could log an error that close failed in the old close() path
where we cannot propagate the error.

Also why the mutex_lock_interruptible() ?  If you change that to
a normal mutex_lock() you loose one of the possible 2 error cases and
I doubt anyone is going to do a CTRL-C of the process doing the
inhibiting (or that that process starts a timer using a signal
to ensure the inhibit does not take to long or some such).

Regards,

Hans




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