How to tell when a gendisk has been freed?

From: tomerma1
Date: Fri Oct 02 2009 - 09:55:13 EST


Hi,

Im writing a block device that does asynchronous mirroring. The user creates a device by giving a local device and
connecting to a remote device (on the net), mirroring writes to both.

When the user is done with the device i would like to give him the option of deleting the device. To do that, i first
stop taking requests (i disallow opens by looking at a variable i allocated for that device (a custom struct)), next
wait until there are no more active make_requests, and finally i free everything... However, theres a problem
with open - when i free the device, the open dereferences a variable i allocated for that device, but i have already
freed the device.

The only safe way to free the device is when i know for sure no more opens or make_requests can be called...
To do that i have to know when the gendisk is gone (even if i del_gendisk it, and wait until the opener counter drops to
zero, i cant be sure that another open isnt being executed at the moment)...
However, i didnt see any way to do it, so i was wondering what is the right way to do it?

Thanks,
Tomer

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