Re: module use count & unloading

[Thomas Koeller <thomas@koeller.dyndns.org>]

On Thursday 18 December 2003 17:37, Greg KH wrote:
>
> It wasn't safe to do that in 2.4 either.  That would easily unload your
> USB controller drivers, USB keyboard and USB mouse drivers, as they all
> do not increment their in-use count.

Thanks for your reply. I am, however, somewhat confused now. If the
in-use count cannot be trusted, then unloading a module is a fundamentally
unsafe operation, and a tool like 'rmmod' should not exist at all. I also
remember that in 2.4 periodic unloading of all unused autoloaded modules
by a cron job used to work just fine. And finally, if module unloading is
inherently unsafe, what is the significance of all this stuff about
forced module unloading and its dangers?

I assumed this was a bug at first and reported it as one, because I could
not make much sense of it. Now that I've been told that this kind of
behavior is actually intended, I still cannot...

tk
-- 
Thomas Koeller
thomas at koeller dot dyndns dot org