• Alan Stern's avatar
    Kobject: drop child->parent ref at unregistration · 09f82ea9
    Alan Stern authored
    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.
    
    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.
    Signed-off-by: default avatarAlan Stern <stern@rowland.harvard.edu>
    Cc: Kay Sievers <kay.sievers@vrfy.org>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarGreg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@suse.de>
    
    09f82ea9
kobject.c 21.2 KB