Re: [PATCH 00/40] Staging: hv: Driver cleanup

On Thu, 30 Jun 2011 23:32:34 +0000
KY Srinivasan [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

-----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.

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.

Greg,

I am thinking of  going back to my original implementation where I had one scsi host
per IDE device. This will certainly simply the code. Let me know what you think. If you
agree with this approach, please drop this patch-set, I will send you a new set of patches.

I think there ref counting on network devices is also unneeded
as long as the unregister logic handles RCU correctly. The network layer
calls the driver unregister routine after all packets are gone.