Re: [PATCH] Kobjects: drop child->parent ref at unregistration

[Andrew Morton]

On Mon, 19 Nov 2007 10:53:40 -0500 (EST)
Alan Stern <stern@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> This patch (as1015) reverts changes that were made to the driver core
> about four years ago.  The intent back then was to avoid certain kinds
> of invalid memory accesses by leaving kernel objects allocated as long
> as any of their children were still allocated.  The original and
> correct approach was to wait only as long as any children were still
> _registered_; that's what this patch reinstates.

What happened with this?

> This fixes a problem in the SCSI core made visible by the class_device
> to regular device conversion: A reference loop (scsi_device holds
> reference to request_queue, which is the child of a gendisk, which is
> the child of the scsi_device) prevents the data structures from being
> released, even though they are deregistered okay.
> 
> It's possible that this change will cause a few bugs to surface,
> things that have been hidden for several years.  They can be fixed
> easily enough by having the child device take an explicit reference to
> the parent whenever needed.
> 

How will such bugs manifest?  Ideally via a nice printk and a stack trace
followed by damage avoidance.

If it's via a mysterious crash or something similarly obscure then can we
improve that?

-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/