On Thursday 17 July 2003 22:22, Jeff Garzik wrote:
> David S. Miller wrote:
> > On Thu, 17 Jul 2003 12:00:58 -0400
> >
> > Jeff Garzik <jgarzik@pobox.com> wrote:
> >>David? Does Rusty have a plan here or something?
> >
> > It just works how it works and that's it.
> >
> > Net devices are reference counted, anything more is superfluous.
> > They may be yanked out of the kernel whenever you want.
>
> (I'm obviously just realizing the implications of this... missed it
> completely during the earlier discussions)
>
> Object lifetime is just part of the story.
>
> This change is a major behavior change. The whole point of removing a
> module is knowing its gone ;-) And that is completely changed now.
> Modules are very often used by developers in a "modprobe ; test ; rmmod"
> cycle, and that's now impossible (you don't know when the net device,
> and thus your code, is really gone). It's already breaking userland,
> which does sweeps for zero-refcount modules among other things.
Most USB drivers can be unloaded at any time, so this problem already
existed elsewhere.
Duncan.
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Jul 23 2003 - 22:00:32 EST