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>

0 files changed, 0 insertions, 0 deletions