Re: network driver usage count

Stephen Hemminger <shemminger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

On Wed, 21 Nov 2007 20:45:11 +0100
Ferenc Wagner <wferi@xxxxxxx> wrote:

Under 2.6.23.1, my lsmod output shows this:

$ lsmod | grep tg3
tg3 100580 0

The usage count is zero, even though it drives my two physical
interfaces:

$ ls -l /sys/class/net/eth-gb?/device/driver
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 2007-11-21 19:58 /sys/class/net/eth-gb1/device/driver -> ../../../bus/pci/drivers/tg3
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 2007-11-21 19:58 /sys/class/net/eth-gb2/device/driver -> ../../../bus/pci/drivers/tg3

These interfaces are up and bonded together, but that doesn't seem to
matter at all. I also checked other machines, the network driver
(tg3, e1000) usage counts are always zero under various recent 2.6
kernels, but nonzero under 2.4.21 for example.

And really, the module could be removed, cutting my ssh session. :)

Was this made possible intentionally? If yes, why?

Yes, so devices can be removed at anytime.

Hmm, that would warrant nuking all the reference counts on every
driver. I must be missing something, since I really feel it goes
against common sense. Can you point me to some discussion of this
change? I mean, I couldn't remove the driver of a mounted filesystem.
So why can I remove a driver serving live network traffic?
--
Thanks,
Feri.
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