Really need help understanding why rmmod osst hangs whenever osstgets loaded by hotplug at boot

From: Willem Riede
Date: Wed Nov 03 2004 - 19:40:58 EST


So nobody knows how this works? Thanks, Willem Riede.
---
On 10/31/2004 09:24:10 AM, Willem Riede wrote:
Folks,

I need some help here. I've been wrecking my brain to understand why
"rmmod osst" works just fine whenever I perfom the "modprobe osst"
manually from a terminal but always hangs when I coax hotplug (by a
modified /etc/hotplug/scsi.agent) to do the loading at boot time...

[root@fallguy osst]# ps alx
F UID PID PPID PRI NI VSZ RSS WCHAN STAT TTY TIME COMMAND
4 0 3509 3472 17 0 3124 380 - D+ pts/1 0:00 rmmod osst

It is the call to "scsi_unregister_driver(&osst_template.gendrv)" that
doesn't return. AFAICT, this can only be due to "down(&drv->unload_sem)"
in driver_unregister() at line 111 of linux-2.6.9/drivers/base/driver.c.

For that semaphore to be free a call to "up(&drv->unload_sem)" in
driver_release() at line 68 of linux-2.6.9/drivers/base/bus.c is needed.

That would happen if osst_template.gendrv.bus->subsys.kset.kobj.kref.refcount

reached zero in put_bus() called from bus_remove_driver() [put_bus translates

into a kobject_put which does kref_put(&kobj->kref, kobject_release), which
is documented to "Decrement the refcount, and if 0, call kobject_cleanup()",
with kobject_cleanup doing "get_ktype(kobj)->release(kobj)"].

Having traced all that, and created some debug output fromm osst, I'm now
even more baffled -- the refcount is 14 regardless of when/how osst was
loaded at the time of the call to scsi_unregister_driver (the only difference
is that it already reached 14 when osst initialized, if osst gets loaded at
boot time register_driver makes it 10, with 4 references counted later).

The other counts must be from the other drivers on the "scsi" bus:
[root@fallguy ~]# ls /sys/bus/scsi/drivers
osst sd sr st

There should be no way that refcount can make it back to zero, which would
imply that rmmod osst should always hang. But it doesn't. Which must mean
that I don't realy understand what's going on :-(

So I'm lost, which is why I'm asking for help :-) . Can somebody explain it?

(by the way, I can get rmmod st to hang in the same way)

For the record - I'm doing this testing on a scsi based dual PIII machine
running Fedora Core release 2.92 (FC3 Test 3) kernel 2.6.9-1.643smp.

Thanks, Willem Riede.



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