On 01/11/2014 09:27 PM, Ben Hutchings wrote:
On Sat, 2014-01-11 at 13:48 -0600, Larry Finger wrote:
On openSUSE systems, the script that installs the firmware for b43 also
unloads and reloads the driver. When the firmware was not previously
available, the driver has stalled at a wait_for_completion(). When the
unload routine releases that hold, the driver encounters structures
that have already been deleted and generates a fatal condition. When
the user does a manual restart, the file system cleanup frequently
results in the firmware files being deleted and the user is never able
to install the firmware. The fix is to change the wait_for_completion()
with a wait_for_completion_timeout() with a 60 second wait period.
There is a potential race condition; however, the chances that less
than a minute has elapsed between the initial driver load and a
subsequent unload is very unlikely.
A minute-long race is 'unlikely' to be hit? Seriously?!
Ben,
If you force a reboot before the minute expires, nothing weird happens. The only
race condition happens when the user has to log in, open a terminal, run a
script that downloads 13.5 MiB of files from the Internet, and then executes the
firmware extraction program. On my 10 Mbps external line and a 2 GHz CPU, that
takes 32 s, plus any time to enter the password for a sudo operation. That was
the basis for my conclusion that a race is unlikely.
What is the minimum time that should be allowed for a request_firmware_nowait()
to respond? I know we had to go to asynchronous fw loading because the
synchronous version would timeout at 30 s.
Larry
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