Some driviers may have the chance to increase a reference count that has dropped to zero when using get_device() because of their design. We have met such a issue with scsi: https://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-scsi/msg115295.html The scsi core will keep the scsi device object in the host list after it has been deleted and the iterator can still find it. All of the places where need iterating have to check the state of the scsi device and this makes a lot of code redundancy and complexity. Provide a safe mechanism in get_device() by using kobject_get_unless_zero(). Suggested-by: Bart Van Assche <bart.vanassche@xxxxxxx> Signed-off-by: Jason Yan <yanaijie@xxxxxxxxxx> CC: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> CC: Bart Van Assche <bart.vanassche@xxxxxxx> CC: Ewan D. Milne <emilne@xxxxxxxxxx> CC: James E.J. Bottomley <jejb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> CC: Christoph Hellwig <hch@xxxxxx> --- drivers/base/core.c | 2 +- 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/drivers/base/core.c b/drivers/base/core.c index 12ebd05..cc74810 100644 --- a/drivers/base/core.c +++ b/drivers/base/core.c @@ -1916,7 +1916,7 @@ EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL(device_register); */ struct device *get_device(struct device *dev) { - return dev ? kobj_to_dev(kobject_get(&dev->kobj)) : NULL; + return dev && kobject_get_unless_zero(&dev->kobj) ? dev : NULL; } EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL(get_device); -- 2.9.5
