Re: [PATCH v2 10/32] liveupdate: luo_core: Live Update Orchestrator

[Pasha Tatashin <pasha.tatashin@soleen.com>]

On Tue, Aug 5, 2025 at 12:31 PM Jason Gunthorpe <jgg@nvidia.com> wrote:
>
> On Sun, Aug 03, 2025 at 09:11:20PM -0400, Pasha Tatashin wrote:
>
> > Having a global state is necessary for performance optimizations. This
> > is similar to why we export the state to userspace via sysfs: it
> > allows other subsystems to behave differently during a
> > performance-optimized live update versus a normal boot.
>
> > For example, in our code base we have a driver that doesn't
> > participate in the live update itself (it has no state to preserve).
> > However, during boot, it checks this global state. If it's a live
> > update boot, the driver skips certain steps, like loading firmware, to
> > accelerate the overall boot time.
>
> TBH, I'm against this. Give the driver a 0 byte state if it wants to
> behave differently during live update. We should not be making
> implicit things like this.
>
> Plus the usual complaining about building core kernel infrastructure
> around weird out of tree drivers.
>
> If userspace wants a device to participate in live update, even just
> "optimizations", then it has to opt in.
>
> Frankly, this driver has no idea what the prior kernel did, and by
> "optimizing" I think you are actually assuming that the prior kernel
> had it bound to a normal kernel driver that left it in some
> predictable configuration.

Fair enough, that subsystem / driver should simply participate in the
live update process normally.

> Vs say bound to VFIO and completely messed up.
>
> So this should be represented by a LUO serialization that says "the
> prior kernel left this device in well defined state X" even if it
> takes 0 bytes to describe that state.
>
> So no globals, there should be a way for a driver to tell if it is
> participating in LUO, but not some global 'is luo' boot fla.g
>
> > > +       ret = liveupdate_register_subsystem(&luo_file_subsys);
> > > +       if (ret) {
> > > +               pr_warn("Failed to register luo_file subsystem [%d]\n", ret);
> > > +               return ret;
> > > +       }
> > > +
> > > +       if (liveupdate_state_updated()) {
> > >
> > > Thats going to be a standard pattern - I would expect that
> > > liveupdate_register_subsystem() would do the check for updated and
> > > then arrange to call back something like
> > > liveupdate_subsystem.ops.post_update()

I added another callback liveupdate_subsystem.ops.post_update(), which
gets called on live update, just when a subsystem registers with LUO,
because that is when we know that it is ready. I will send the new
patch version soon.

Thank you,
Pasha