thermal: fix race condition when updating cooling device

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>

0 files changed, 0 insertions, 0 deletions