-----Original Message-----
From: Christoph Hellwig [mailto:hch@infradead.org]
Sent: Thursday, June 30, 2011 3:34 PM
To: KY Srinivasan
Cc: gregkh@suse.de; linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org;
devel@linuxdriverproject.org; virtualization@lists.osdl.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH 00/40] Staging: hv: Driver cleanup

On Wed, Jun 29, 2011 at 07:38:21AM -0700, K. Y. Srinivasan wrote:

quoted

Further cleanup of the hv drivers:

	1) Cleanup the reference counting mess for both stor and net devices.

I really don't understand the need for reference counting on the storage
side, especially now that you only have a SCSI driver.  The SCSI
midlayer does proper counting on it's objects (Scsi_Host, scsi_device,
scsi_cmnd), so you'll get that for free given that SCSI drivers just
piggyback on the midlayer lifetime rules.

The reference counting allows us to properly deal with messages coming back from the host
to the guest with a racing remove of the device. I am told these messages could potentially be
not a response to a message sent from the guest.

For now your patches should probably go in as-is, but mid-term you
should be able to completely remove that code on the storage side.

Thanks. Sure, we will always try to simplify the code.

Regards,

K. Y