Re: [RFC] killing the NR_IRQS arrays.

Eric W. Biederman
2007-02-18T03:59:31Z

Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org> writes:

>
>> We might need this. But I don't think we need reference counting in
>> the traditional sense. For all practical purpose we already have
>> dynamic irq allocation and it hasn't proven necessary. I would
>> prefer to go to lengths to avoid having to expose that kind of
>> an issue to driver code.
>
> I think we do need proper refcounting, but I also think that most
> drivers will not need to see it.
>
> For example, a PCI driver will most probably just do something along the
> lines of the existing request_irq(pdev->irq), the liftime of pdev->irq
> is managed by the PCI core.
>
> Same goes with MSIs imho, the MSI core can manage the lifetime
> transparently.

Yes. I'm optimistic that we won't find a case where refcounting will
be needed.

Eric