net: make free_netdev() more lenient with unregistering devices
There are two flavors of handling netdev registration:
- ones called without holding rtnl_lock: register_netdev() and
unregister_netdev(); and
- those called with rtnl_lock held: register_netdevice() and
unregister_netdevice().
While the semantics of the former are pretty clear, the same can't
be said about the latter. The netdev_todo mechanism is utilized to
perform some of the device unregistering tasks and it hooks into
rtnl_unlock() so the locked variants can't actually finish the work.
In general free_netdev() does not mix well with locked calls. Most
drivers operating under rtnl_lock set dev->needs_free_netdev to true
and expect core to make the free_netdev() call some time later.
The part where this becomes most problematic is error paths. There is
no way to unwind the state cleanly after a call to register_netdevice(),
since unreg can't be performed fully without dropping locks.
Make free_netdev() more lenient, and defer the freeing if device
is being unregistered. This allows error paths to simply call
free_netdev() both after register_netdevice() failed, and after
a call to unregister_netdevice() but before dropping rtnl_lock.
Simplify the error paths which are currently doing gymnastics
around free_netdev() handling.
Signed-off-by: Jakub Kicinski <kuba@kernel.org>
diff --git a/net/core/rtnetlink.c b/net/core/rtnetlink.c
index 79f514a..3d6ab19 100644
--- a/net/core/rtnetlink.c
+++ b/net/core/rtnetlink.c
@@ -3439,26 +3439,15 @@ static int __rtnl_newlink(struct sk_buff *skb, struct nlmsghdr *nlh,
dev->ifindex = ifm->ifi_index;
- if (ops->newlink) {
+ if (ops->newlink)
err = ops->newlink(link_net ? : net, dev, tb, data, extack);
- /* Drivers should set dev->needs_free_netdev
- * and unregister it on failure after registration
- * so that device could be finally freed in rtnl_unlock.
- */
- if (err < 0) {
- /* If device is not registered at all, free it now */
- if (dev->reg_state == NETREG_UNINITIALIZED ||
- dev->reg_state == NETREG_UNREGISTERED)
- free_netdev(dev);
- goto out;
- }
- } else {
+ else
err = register_netdevice(dev);
- if (err < 0) {
- free_netdev(dev);
- goto out;
- }
+ if (err < 0) {
+ free_netdev(dev);
+ goto out;
}
+
err = rtnl_configure_link(dev, ifm);
if (err < 0)
goto out_unregister;