Subject: Re: [PATCH net-next 3/3 v9] drivers: net: ethernet: qualcomm: rmnet: Initial implementation

From: Subash Abhinov Kasiviswanathan <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 28 Aug 2017 11:40:39 -0600

> 
> In these code paths where you are the writer, you have to rely upon
> the RTNL mutex (or some other mutual exclusion mechanism) to protect
> the update operation.  RCU locking itself does not provide this.
> 
> So you should use something like rcu_dereference_rtnl() or similar.
> 
> So this would be rmnet_force_unassociate_device() and rmnet_dellink()
> 
> RCU is subtle and the writer paths have the be handled differently
> from the reader paths.  Please take some time to study how RCU should
> be applied properly in these situations rather than just slapping a
> patch together overnight.
> 
> Thank you.

Sorry about the mess David.

Can you tell me if the following design is correct -

The shared resource which needs to be protected is 
real_dev->rx_handler_data.

For the writer path, this needs to be protected using rtnl_lock() and 
rcu.
The writer paths are rmnet_newlink(), rmnet_delink() and
rmnet_force_unassociate_device(). These paths are already called with
rtnl_lock() acquired in, so we just need to acquire the rcu_read_lock(). 
To
dereference here, we will need to use rtnl_dereference().

For the reader path, the real_dev->rx_handler_data is called in the TX / 
RX
path. We only need rcu_read_lock() for these scenarios. In these cases,
the rcu_read_lock() is held in __dev_queue_xmit() and
netif_receive_skb_internal(), so readers need to use 
rcu_dereference_rtnl()
to get the relevant information.