From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S271226AbTG2CWx (ORCPT ); Mon, 28 Jul 2003 22:22:53 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S271227AbTG2CWx (ORCPT ); Mon, 28 Jul 2003 22:22:53 -0400 Received: from galaxy.lunarpages.com ([64.235.234.165]:64647 "EHLO galaxy.lunarpages.com") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S271226AbTG2CWv (ORCPT ); Mon, 28 Jul 2003 22:22:51 -0400 Message-ID: <3F25DE61.6030506@genebrew.com> Date: Mon, 28 Jul 2003 22:39:29 -0400 From: Rahul Karnik User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030706 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Rusty Russell CC: davem@redhat.com, arjanv@redhat.com, torvalds@transmeta.com, greg@kroah.com, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: [PATCH] Remove module reference counting. References: <20030729020058.592C02C296@lists.samba.org> In-Reply-To: <20030729020058.592C02C296@lists.samba.org> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-AntiAbuse: This header was added to track abuse, please include it with any abuse report X-AntiAbuse: Primary Hostname - galaxy.lunarpages.com X-AntiAbuse: Original Domain - vger.kernel.org X-AntiAbuse: Originator/Caller UID/GID - [0 0] / [47 12] X-AntiAbuse: Sender Address Domain - genebrew.com Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Rusty, > Yes, but that cuts both ways: noone fixes these broken drivers, but > work around them using module removal, leaving newbies with broken > laptops 8( Good point; so there's the work of fixing power management with drivers known to load and unload correctly (dependent on hardware specs, undocumented registers, etcc), or adding refcounting to fix the remaining cases of drivers that do not unload safely (solvable in kernel). Pick your poison. :) By the way, what about a reload option that re-inits the module? Is that possible/present, or subject to the same difficulties as unloading? > Not really. Adding modules is required. Removing them is a more > dubious goal, and if we didn't already have it, I know we'd balk at > doing it. Fair enough. I think we all agree that module unloading is a hard problem. Thanks, Rahul -- Rahul Karnik rahul@genebrew.com