[ofa-general] IB kernel modules and the kobject release() method

[Greg KH]

On Fri, Aug 07, 2009 at 09:26:33AM +0200, Bart Van Assche wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 6, 2009 at 9:58 PM, Roland Dreier<rdreier at cisco.com> wrote:
> >
> >  > Are you sure that this indicates a shortcoming in the kobject
> >  > debugging code ? The most recent messages related to the message "does
> >  > not have a release() function, it is broken and must be fixed" I could
> >  > find on the LKML date from July 16, 2009
> >  > (http://lkml.org/lkml/2009/7/16/306 and
> >  > http://lkml.org/lkml/2009/7/16/391). As you can see Greg KH
> >  > acknowledges that if this message is logged that this indicates a
> >  > problem that should be fixed.
> >
> > I'm not sure -- I just assume that the core module unloading code is
> > working OK, since it is so heavily tested.  If there were really a "must
> > be fixed" problem with module unloading then someone would surely have
> > hit more than a warning message.
> 
> (added Greg KH and the LKML in CC)
> 
> I tried to look up more information about kobjects. The comment of
> commit 7a6a41615bfb2f03ce797bc24104c50b42c935e5 suggests that in the
> past the function kobject_cleanup() did not free the memory allocated
> for static kobject names but that this was the responsibility of the
> release() function. This should have been fixed in the current version
> of kobject_cleanup(). So I'm wondering whether the message that
> kobjects that do not have a release() function are broken still makes
> sense ?

No, it still makes sense :)

thanks,

greg k-h