fbcon: fix race condition between console lock and cursor timer (v1.1)
authorDave Airlie <airlied@redhat.com>
Tue, 21 Aug 2012 06:29:47 +0000 (16:29 +1000)
committerBen Hutchings <ben@decadent.org.uk>
Wed, 12 Sep 2012 02:37:24 +0000 (03:37 +0100)
commit94fb24693f5fff6ddbbfe2efd93be7f24e47e669
tree4fdf8b2fa0f2a531b12f52888e353ce1ab6e3b3c
parent2744f4e762141d0b1233f962ebe706d60cd460d2
fbcon: fix race condition between console lock and cursor timer (v1.1)

commit d8636a2717bb3da2a7ce2154bf08de90bb8c87b0 upstream.

So we've had a fair few reports of fbcon handover breakage between
efi/vesafb and i915 surface recently, so I dedicated a couple of
days to finding the problem.

Essentially the last thing we saw was the conflicting framebuffer
message and that was all.

So after much tracing with direct netconsole writes (printks
under console_lock not so useful), I think I found the race.

Thread A (driver load)    Thread B (timer thread)
  unbind_con_driver ->              |
  bind_con_driver ->                |
  vc->vc_sw->con_deinit ->          |
  fbcon_deinit ->                   |
  console_lock()                    |
      |                             |
      |                       fbcon_flashcursor timer fires
      |                       console_lock() <- blocked for A
      |
      |
fbcon_del_cursor_timer ->
  del_timer_sync
  (BOOM)

Of course because all of this is under the console lock,
we never see anything, also since we also just unbound the active
console guess what we never see anything.

Hopefully this fixes the problem for anyone seeing vesafb->kms
driver handoff.

v1.1: add comment suggestion from Alan.

Signed-off-by: Dave Airlie <airlied@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Ben Hutchings <ben@decadent.org.uk>
drivers/video/console/fbcon.c