Re: [PATCH] Driver Core update for 2.6.4

[Greg KH <greg@kroah.com>]

On Tue, Mar 16, 2004 at 05:14:47PM +0100, Andi Kleen wrote:
> Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org> writes:
> >
> > eh?  If there is any argument against this code it is that it is so simple
> > that the thing which it abstracts is not worth abstracting.  But given that
> > it is so unwasteful, this seems unimportant.
> 
> The bloat argument was about the additional pointer in the dynamic 
> data structure (on a 64bit architecture it costs 12 bytes) 

Well balance that out against every usb driver re-implemeting the same
get/put logic with an atomic counter and that "bloat of a pointer" just
got lost in the noise of the extra kernel code size increase :)

> Better would be to pass the callback to kref_put(), but then it would
> be even better to just test the return value (callbacks are obfuscation
> and should be avoided when not needed)

You don't always have the same chunk of code doing the last kref_put()
as the one where we know the release function is at.  See the
kobject/driver model code for an example of this.

thanks,

greg k-h