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.
I can't believe I missed this.
Jeff
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