Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1760760AbXK2Pyf (ORCPT ); Thu, 29 Nov 2007 10:54:35 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1755470AbXK2Py1 (ORCPT ); Thu, 29 Nov 2007 10:54:27 -0500 Received: from iolanthe.rowland.org ([192.131.102.54]:35692 "HELO iolanthe.rowland.org" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with SMTP id S1755230AbXK2Py1 (ORCPT ); Thu, 29 Nov 2007 10:54:27 -0500 Date: Thu, 29 Nov 2007 10:54:26 -0500 (EST) From: Alan Stern X-X-Sender: stern@iolanthe.rowland.org To: Kay Sievers cc: Cornelia Huck , Greg KH , Kernel development list , Jonathan Corbet , Randy Dunlap Subject: Re: [PATCH] kobject: make sure kobj->ktype is set before kobject_init In-Reply-To: <1196333946.3242.214.camel@lov.site> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1333 Lines: 36 On Thu, 29 Nov 2007, Kay Sievers wrote: > > And if someone calls kobject_put() after kobject_init() to clean up, > > their release function will not be called if they didn't set the ktype. > > So the check really belongs into kobject_init() IMO. Right. And even though cleaning up no longer needs to drop a reference to the kset, it still might need to free the kobject's name. So for example, either of these sequences: kobject_init(); kobject_set_name(); kobject_set_name(); kobject_init(); ... ... kobject_free(); kobject_free(); would leak memory. In fact, if we were designing the kobject API from scratch, I'd suggest making the ktype value an argument to kobject_init() so that it _couldn't_ be omitted. > Hmm, will one expect that the whole object will also be free'd when we > suggest to call kobject_put() to cleanup? That might be pretty > unexpected, right? I don't understand the question. People _already_ expect the cleanup routine to free the kobject when the last reference is dropped. Why should there be any confusion over this? Alan Stern - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/