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From: Oliver Neukum <oneukum@suse.de>
Organization: Novell
To: Alan Stern <stern@rowland.harvard.edu>
Subject: Re: refcounting drivers' data structures used in sysfs buffers
Date: Mon, 12 Mar 2007 20:49:01 +0100
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Cc: Dmitry Torokhov <dmitry.torokhov@gmail.com>,
       Maneesh Soni <maneesh@in.ibm.com>, gregkh@suse.de,
       linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
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Am Montag, 12. März 2007 20:31 schrieb Alan Stern:
> On Mon, 12 Mar 2007, Oliver Neukum wrote:
> 
> > > I'm with Dmitry; the whole thing becomes much, much simpler if we put back
> > > your patch and prevent sysfs access after unregistering an attribute 
> > > file.  No API changes are needed, no driver changes are needed, no radical 
> > > core changes are needed,...  All we would have to do is fix the one SCSI 
> > > method to make it use a workqueue.
> > 
> > Try.
> 
> I did.  Didn't you see this message from Saturday:
> 
> http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=117355959020831&w=2

Yes. In this case, silence is partial agreement. However, convincing me
is futile if Linus rejects the approach.

I wrote the original patch. But this problem must be solved. If the
first attempt is rejected, I'll try another.

> I sent it to Linus as well as to all of you.  No replies received so far 
> from anybody.
> 
> >  I don't like reverting my own code. But I predict he'll tell you that a
> > driver's bond with a device should be represented in a data structure
> > that is to be refcounted.
> 
> :-)

Coming to think about it, he might be right there.

	Regards
		Oliver