[PATCH 1/2] PM / runtime: Allow drivers to override runtime PM behaviour on sleep

[Rafael J. Wysocki]

On Thursday, November 28, 2019 5:50:26 PM CET Thierry Reding wrote:
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> On Thu, Nov 28, 2019 at 05:14:51PM +0100, Rafael J. Wysocki wrote:
> > On Thu, Nov 28, 2019 at 5:03 PM Thierry Reding <thierry.reding at gmail.com>=
>  wrote:
> > >
> > > From: Thierry Reding <treding at nvidia.com>
> > >
> > > Currently the driver PM core will automatically acquire a runtime PM
> > > reference for devices before system sleep is entered. This is needed
> > > to avoid potential issues related to devices' parents getting put to
> > > runtime suspend at the wrong time and causing problems with their
> > > children.
> >=20
> > Not only for that.
> >=20
> > > In some cases drivers are carefully written to avoid such issues and
> > > the default behaviour can be changed to allow runtime PM to operate
> > > regularly during system sleep.
> >=20
> > But this change breaks quite a few assumptions in the core too, so no,
> > it can't be made.
> 
> Anything in particular that I can look at? I'm not seeing any issues
> when I test this, which could of course mean that I'm just getting
> lucky.

There are races and such that you may never hit during casual testing.

> One thing that irritated me is that I think this used to work. I do
> recall testing suspend/resume a few years ago and devices would get
> properly runtime suspended/resumed.

Not true at all.

The PM core has always taken PM-runtime references on all devices pretty much
since when PM-runtime was introduced.

> I did some digging but couldn't
> find anything that would have had an impact on this.
> 
> Given that this is completely opt-in feature, why are you categorically
> NAK'ing this?

The general problem is that if any device has been touched by system-wide
suspend code, it should not be subject to PM-runtime any more until the
subsequent system-wide resume is able to undo whatever the suspend did.

Moreover, if a device is runtime-suspended, the system-wide suspend code
may mishandle it, in general.  That's why PM-runtime suspend is not allowed
during system-wide transitions at all.  And it has always been like that.

For a specific platform you may be able to overcome these limitations if
you are careful enough, but certainly they are there in general and surely
you cannot prevent people from using your opt-in just because they think
that they know what they are doing.

> Is there some other alternative that I can look into?

First of all, ensure that the dpm_list ordering is what it should be on the
system/platform in question.  That can be done with the help of device links.

In addition, make sure that the devices needed to suspend other devices are
suspended in the noirq phase of system-wide suspend and resumed in the
noirq phase of system-wide resume.  Or at least all of the other devices
need to be suspended before them and resumed after them.

These two things should allow you to cover the vast majority of cases if
not all of them without messing up with the rules.

Thanks!