Speaker
Description
devm_kzalloc() has been introduced more than 15 years ago and has
steadily grown in usage through the kernel sources (more than 6000 calls
and counting). While it has helped lowering the number of memory leaks,
it is not the magic tool that many seem to think it is.
The devres family of functions tie the lifetime of the resources they
allocate to the lifetime of a struct device bind to a driver. This is
the right thing to do for many resources, for instance MMIO or
interrupts need to be released when the device is unbound from its
driver at the latest, and the corresponding devm_* helpers ensure this.
However, drivers that expose resources to userspace have, in many cases,
to ensure that those resources can be safely accessed after the device
is unbound from its driver. A particular example is character device
nodes, which userspace can keep open and close after the device has been
unbound from the driver. If the memory region that stores the struct
cdev instance is allocated by devm_kzalloc(), it will be freed before
the file release handler gets to run.
Most kernel developers are not aware of this issue that affects an ever
growing number of drivers. The problem has been discussed in the past
([1], [2]) - interestingly in the context of Kernel Summit proposals,
but never scheduled there - but never addressed.
This talk proposal aims at raising awareness of the problem, present a
possible solution that has been proposed as an RFC ([3]), and discuss
what we can do to solve the issue. Solutions at the technical, community
and process levels will be discussed, as addressing the devm_kzalloc()
hamr also requires a plan to teach the kernel community and catch new
offending code when it gets submitted.
[1] https://lore.kernel.org/all/2111196.TG1k3f53YQ@avalon/
[2] https://lore.kernel.org/all/YOagA4bgdGYos5aa@kroah.com/
[3] https://lore.kernel.org/linux-media/20171116003349.19235-1-laurent.pinchart+renesas@ideasonboard.com/
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