Subject: Re: [PATCH] rfkill: allocate static minor

From: Greg KH <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 5 Nov 2019 18:25:25 +0100

On Thu, Oct 24, 2019 at 10:23:57PM +0200, Marcel Holtmann wrote:
> Hi Greg,
> 
> >> udev has a feature of creating /dev/<node> device-nodes if it finds
> >> a devnode:<node> modalias. This allows for auto-loading of modules that
> >> provide the node. This requires to use a statically allocated minor
> >> number for misc character devices.
> >> 
> >> However, rfkill uses dynamic minor numbers and prevents auto-loading
> >> of the module. So allocate the next static misc minor number and use
> >> it for rfkill.
> > 
> > As rfkill has been around for a long time, what new use case is needing
> > to auto-load this based on a major number?
> 
> we have bug reports from iwd users where it fails opening /dev/rfkill. Since iwd can be actually started before the WiFi hardware is fully probed and all its drivers are loaded, we have a race-condition here if rfkill is not capable of auto-loading.
> 
> The difference is really that iwd is a fully self-contained WiFi daemon compared to wpa_supplicant which is just some sort of helper. iwd is fully hot plug capable as well compared to wpa_supplicant. It looks like this is exposing the race condition for our users. Frankly, we should have fixed rfkill a long time ago when we fixed uinput, uhid etc, but seems we forgot it. I assume mainly because it magically got loaded in time by some module dependencies.

You need a better email client, one with \n characters...

Anyway, this sounds reasonable, I'll go queue this up for 5.5.

thanks,

greg k-h