When multiple thermal zones are bound to the same cooling device, multiple
kernel threads may want to update the cooling device state by calling
thermal_cdev_update(). Having cdev not protected by a mutex can lead to a race
condition. Consider the following situation with two kernel threads k1 and k2:
Thread k1 Thread k2
||
|| call thermal_cdev_update()
|| ...
|| set_cur_state(cdev, target);
call power_actor_set_power() ||
... ||
instance->target = state; ||
cdev->updated = false; ||
|| cdev->updated = true;
|| // completes execution
call thermal_cdev_update() ||
// cdev->updated == true ||
return; ||
\/
time
k2 has already looped through the thermal instances looking for the deepest
cooling device state and is preempted right before setting cdev->updated to
true. Now, k1 runs, modifies the thermal instance state and sets cdev->updated
to false. Then, k1 is preempted and k2 continues the execution by setting
cdev->updated to true, therefore preventing k1 from performing the update.
Notice that this is not an issue if k2 looks at the instance->target modified by
k1 "after" it is assigned by k1. In fact, in this case the update will happen
anyway and k1 can safely return immediately from thermal_cdev_update().
This may lead to a situation where a thermal governor never updates the cooling
device. For example, this is the case for the step_wise governor: when calling
the function thermal_zone_trip_update(), the governor may always get a new state
equal to the old one (which, however, wasn't notified to the cooling device) and
will therefore skip the update.
CC: Zhang Rui <rui.zhang@intel.com>
CC: Eduardo Valentin <edubezval@gmail.com>
CC: Peter Feuerer <peter@piie.net>
Reported-by: Toby Huang <toby.huang@arm.com>
Signed-off-by: Michele Di Giorgio <michele.digiorgio@arm.com>
Reviewed-by: Javi Merino <javi.merino@arm.com>
Signed-off-by: Zhang Rui <rui.zhang@intel.com>