On Wed, 2017-11-29 at 14:20 -0500, Ewan D. Milne wrote: > OK, well, I think the point still stands, though, once the refcount > goes to zero and the destructor is invoked, a get that then increments > the refcount seems fundamentally wrong to me. I agree that incrementing a reference count that has dropped to zero is wrong. However, that's what happens currently. That behavior has been reported as a bug. We need to fix this behavior, either through the patch at the start of this thread or by using code that avoids to increment a zero reference count, e.g. kobject_get_unless_zero(). Bart.