Lets not trick ourselves into thinking "drm_device" objects are not
ref-counted. That's just utterly stupid. We manage "drm_minor" objects on
each drm-device and each minor can have an unlimited number of open
handles. Each of these handles has the drm_minor (and thus the drm_device)
as private-data in the file-handle. Therefore, we may not destroy
"drm_device" until all these handles are closed.
It is *not* possible to reset all these pointers atomically and restrict
access to them, and this is *not* how this is done! Instead, we use
ref-counts to make sure the object is valid and not freed.
Note that we currently use "dev->open_count" for that, which is *exactly*
the same as a reference-count, just open coded. So this patch doesn't
change any semantics on DRM devices (well, this patch just introduces the
ref-count, anyway. Follow-up patches will replace open_count by it).
Also note that generic VFS revoke support could allow us to drop this
ref-count again. We could then just synchronously disable any fops->xy()
calls. However, this is not the case, yet, and no such patches are
in sight (and I seriously question the idea of dropping the ref-cnt
again).
Signed-off-by: David Herrmann <dh.herrmann@gmail.com>
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