From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: "David S. Miller" Subject: Re: dev->destructor Date: Tue, 06 May 2003 07:25:29 -0700 (PDT) Sender: netdev-bounce@oss.sgi.com Message-ID: <20030506.072529.52888036.davem@redhat.com> References: <20030502.134804.78707298.davem@redhat.com> <20030503040949.804182C003@lists.samba.org> <20030505090820.50cd5a13.shemminger@osdl.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: Text/Plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: rusty@rustcorp.com.au, kuznet@ms2.inr.ac.ru, netdev@oss.sgi.com, acme@conectiva.com.br Return-path: To: shemminger@osdl.org In-Reply-To: <20030505090820.50cd5a13.shemminger@osdl.org> Errors-to: netdev-bounce@oss.sgi.com List-Id: netdev.vger.kernel.org From: Stephen Hemminger Date: Mon, 5 May 2003 09:08:20 -0700 On Sat, 03 May 2003 14:07:41 +1000 Rusty Russell wrote: > But Alexey said you can only call unregister_netdev from module > unload, ie. if not a module, it can't be unloaded, hence no refcount > needed. I wrote the above paragraph because I'm not sure if I > understood Alexey correctly? There are several flavors of pseudo-network devices like bridging and VLAN that dynamically create/destroy netdev's even when they are not modules. I think you'll understand what Alexey/Rusty are saying better if you consider statically compiled kernel code as a module with an implicit non-zero reference count :-)