On Fri, Apr 07, 2023 at 12:53:47AM +0900, Asahi Lina wrote:
On 06/04/2023 23.15, Daniel Vetter wrote:
On Tue, Mar 07, 2023 at 11:25:32PM +0900, Asahi Lina wrote:
drm_mm provides a simple range allocator, useful for managing virtual address ranges. Add a Rust abstraction to expose this module to Rust drivers.
Signed-off-by: Asahi Lina lina@asahilina.net
In the cover letter you mentioned the design open about embedded the lock into the rust wrappers.
I think for a first step that's perfectly fine.
Longer term we might want to ramp up some "proof of locking" infrastructure in Rust, where callers can supply a lock guard and ideally rust validates at compile time that it's for the right type, and at runtime (like lockdep) that it's consistent and the callers don't mix up locks (like using different locks for the same drm_mm allocator).
That proof-of-lock tuff works in Rust too as far as I know.
But the general thread safety story in Rust is much simpler, you just use methods that take &mut self when locking is the caller's responsibility. That effectively implies that there can only be one reference that can call those methods at any given time, thanks to the borrow checker. Shared references only give you &self, a locked Mutex upgrades that to &mut self, and that's how you get proof of locking at compile time, through and through, not just for the type but for the specific object.
Hm that still has the problem of making sure that you supply the right lock (for generic abstractions like drm_mm or drm/sched where the lock is supplied by the driver.
Once we have the lock then yeah borrow checker makes sure you can't screw up, worst case needs a PhantomData (I guess) as toke of proof to pass around the borrowed lifetime (If I got that right from your use of PhantomData in the sched wrappers).
There's a lot of libraries in the kernel that have this "caller ensures locking" pattern. drm/sched also has these requirements.
Yup, that all usually maps nicely to &mut self in Rust... except for the issue below.
There's two other things I'd like to bring up on this patch though, just because it's a good example. But they're both really general points that apply for all the rust wrappers.
Documentation:
In drm we try to document all the interfaces that drivers use with formal docs. Yes there's some areas that are not great for historical reasons, but for new stuff and new wrappers we're really trying:
This helps in telling internal (even across .c files or in rust across modules within a crate) from stuff drivers access. Sure you have static in C or pub in rust, but that doesn't tell you whether it's public all the way to drivers.
ideally docs have a short intro section that explains the main concepts and links to the main data structures and functions. Just to give readers a good starting point to explore.
Linking all the things, so that readers can connect the different parts. This is really important in C where e.g. get/put() or any such function pairs all needed to be linked together. With rust I'm hoping that rustdoc liberally sprinkles links already and we don't have to do this as much.
Short explainers for parameters. For rust this also means type parameters, for those even simplified examples of how drivers are supposed to use them would help a lot in reading docs & understanding concepts.
Ideally links from the rust to the sphinx side to linke relevant chapters together. Often the bigger explanations are in .rst files with DOT graphs (kms has a bunch I've added) or similar, and it doesn't make that much sense to duplicate all that on the rust side I guess. But it needs to be discoverable.
This might be more a discussion topic for the rust people than you directly. Still needed for the merge-ready patches eventually.
I don't know much about the doc gen stuff on the Rust side so yeah, this is something I need to look into to make it pretty and complete...
From what Miguel has shown I think it's all there already, and the only missing pieces are the cross-linking at a chapter level from rustdoc to rst and sphinx to rstdoc too ideally. But I think for most rust wrappers that will be one link each direction only (e.g. C drm_mm linking to kernel::drm::MM and other way round and done). So absolutely no problem if that one item is sorted out post merge once rustdoc/kernel-sphinx are ready.
Refcounting vs borrowing:
This is honestly much more the eyebrow raising one than the locking. Very often on the C side these datastructures all work with borrow semantics, and you need to explicitly upgrade to a full reference (kref_get or kref_get_unless_zero, depending whether it's a strong or weak reference) if you need the object outside of the mutex/lock guard section.
Again I think for now it's ok, but the sales pitch of rust is that it enables borrow lifetime checking with no runtime cost. Plus viz the vm cleanup example, if you have too many strong backreferences the cleanup flow gets complicated. And it would suck if rust drivers have to add complexity like the openrefcount for the vm example simply because we can't model the borrow semantics well enough to be safe.
So not something that's really bad here, but if we need to resort to full refcounting already for simple datastructures then I'm getting a bit worried about how well rust will cope with the really nasty borrowed reference tricks we're playing in other areas.
Again more a topic for the rust folks I think than specifically here about drm_mm wrapping. Just to get things going I think this is fine.
Yeeeeah... this is a *specific* problem. Drop.
The Allocator<T> itself is perfectly safe to implement without any locking, refcounting, or anything. You just make the methods take &mut self (as they already do), the caller can use it with a single reference or wrap it in an Arc<Mutex<T>> and share it, or whatever.
The problem is the Node<A, T>. When you Drop that, it has to go back to the Allocator. But now you're a different object, so no thread safety guarantees. And you need to keep the Allocator alive. So now to make a safe abstraction, you need refcounting and a mutex.
Lifetimes just don't work here, sadly. Not for a useful abstraction.
I'd love to hear from the other Rust folks whether they have any better ideas...
Hm yeah I think I get the gist of the issue. At time of Drop there's no allocator reference you can borrow and so you're screwed.
In C we tend to solve that by passing both to the unlink/drop stuff (and rust could then ensure that we have legit borrows for both), but I guess that just totally wreaks entire wrapper and makes it really rough to use.
One thing that *can* be done is making the Drop illegal (Rust can't do this "natively" but Linux already has hacks for that, we can make it fail to link if the Drop is ever called). Then you'd have to actively return the Node to the Allocator with a free function. Since Drop is forbidden, and Node is pinned, you'd always have to either return Node objects to the Allocator or leak them. You could drop the Allocator before its nodes, but as far as I know drm_mm can safely handle that (though it will complain), and then due to the previous guarantees the *only* thing you could do with orphan nodes is leak their memory, which is safe.
It would work... but it breaks the whole Rust automagic Drop stuff.
Yeah I think I see the challenge ...
Thinking about this a bit, I think I want the current mutex/arc semantics for something like a memory allocator (which is one of my primary use cases for drm_mm), since I definitely don't want to be manually returning objects to their allocator all over the place, nor have overarching lifetime requirements that the allocator outlive its objects for safety (that sounds like a can of worms I don't want to open, I'd much rather use a refcount even if I "think" I can prove the lifetime bounds ad-hoc). But for something like a drm_mm that is tracking VA ranges within a VM with all Nodes held internally, maybe I could manage it all internally and have all node destruction be handled via an explicit call into the Allocator.
Yeah I think for gpuva we need to do better, but assuming the gpuva library is in C then rust would just need to encode the safety properties that (hopefully) the C library guarantees ...
And for any driver that just wants to use some range manager the standard wrapping leans heavily on the side of "easy to use".
Maybe the mm abstraction should offer both options? The extra locking can be implemented in terms of the base unlocked version I think (perhaps with some Deref abuse for ergonomics)... I definitely want to hear more opinions about this from other Rust folks, since there are probably other options I haven't considered...
I don't think we need the more raw/tricky one, at least not until we have some serious libraries like gpuva implemented in rust. Or drivers reimplementing the gpuva stuff in their driver :-)
Aside: This, and all the other DRM abstractions, were written before the pin_init stuff from y86 that is in review right now was ready. That may open up more interesting/ergonomic/efficient APIs for some cases, especially where Pin and embedding C types into user objects in some way are involved. So maybe there's room for improvement here. Just a sidenote.
Ah good to know, and yeah that make open some interesting options. -Daniel