watchdog: Add support for dynamically allocated watchdog_device structs

If a driver's watchdog_device struct is part of a dynamically allocated
struct (which it often will be), merely locking the module is not enough,
even with a drivers module locked, the driver can be unbound from the device,
examples:
1) The root user can unbind it through sysfd
2) The i2c bus master driver being unloaded for an i2c watchdog

I will gladly admit that these are corner cases, but we still need to handle
them correctly.

The fix for this consists of 2 parts:
1) Add ref / unref operations, so that the driver can refcount the struct
   holding the watchdog_device struct and delay freeing it until any
   open filehandles referring to it are closed
2) Most driver operations will do IO on the device and the driver should not
   do any IO on the device after it has been unbound. Rather then letting each
   driver deal with this internally, it is better to ensure at the watchdog
   core level that no operations (other then unref) will get called after
   the driver has called watchdog_unregister_device(). This actually is the
   bulk of this patch.

Signed-off-by: Hans de Goede <hdegoede@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Wim Van Sebroeck <wim@iguana.be>

1 files changed, 5 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/include/linux/watchdog.h b/include/linux/watchdog.h
index da1dc1b5274..da70f0facd2 100644
--- a/include/linux/watchdog.h
+++ b/include/linux/watchdog.h
@@ -71,6 +71,8 @@ struct watchdog_device;
  * @status:	The routine that shows the status of the watchdog device.
  * @set_timeout:The routine for setting the watchdog devices timeout value.
  * @get_timeleft:The routine that get's the time that's left before a reset.
+ * @ref:	The ref operation for dyn. allocated watchdog_device structs
+ * @unref:	The unref operation for dyn. allocated watchdog_device structs
  * @ioctl:	The routines that handles extra ioctl calls.
  *
  * The watchdog_ops structure contains a list of low-level operations
@@ -88,6 +90,8 @@ struct watchdog_ops {
 	unsigned int (*status)(struct watchdog_device *);
 	int (*set_timeout)(struct watchdog_device *, unsigned int);
 	unsigned int (*get_timeleft)(struct watchdog_device *);
+	void (*ref)(struct watchdog_device *);
+	void (*unref)(struct watchdog_device *);
 	long (*ioctl)(struct watchdog_device *, unsigned int, unsigned long);
 };
 
@@ -135,6 +139,7 @@ struct watchdog_device {
 #define WDOG_DEV_OPEN		1	/* Opened via /dev/watchdog ? */
 #define WDOG_ALLOW_RELEASE	2	/* Did we receive the magic char ? */
 #define WDOG_NO_WAY_OUT		3	/* Is 'nowayout' feature set ? */
+#define WDOG_UNREGISTERED	4	/* Has the device been unregistered */
 };
 
 #ifdef CONFIG_WATCHDOG_NOWAYOUT