On Thu, 17 Feb 2022, Dan Carpenter wrote:

quoted

The refcount was added less than a year ago by Salah Triki in commit 
fbf42729d0e9 ("HID: elo: update the reference count of the usb device 
structure"), but the commit message doesn't explain why it is 
necessary.  There certainly isn't any obvious reason for it; the driver 
doesn't release any references after elo_remove() returns and we know 
that the usb_device structure won't be deallocated before the driver 
gets unbound.

Salah sent a bunch of these.  The reasoning was explained in this email.

https://www.spinics.net/lists/kernel/msg4026672.html

When he resent the patch, Greg said that taking the reference wasn't
needed so the patch wasn't applied.  (Also it had the same reference
leak so that's a second reason it wasn't applied).

Sorry for late response, I've been away for a week. I have now queued 
revert of all this mess and will be sending it to Linus for 5.17 still. 
Thanks everybody for reporting.

-- 
Jiri Kosina
SUSE Labs