From: Greg KH Subject: Re: [PATCH 04/26] sysfs: sysfs_remove_dir stop checking for bogus cases. Date: Wed, 3 Jun 2009 16:53:22 -0700 Message-ID: <20090603235322.GA19375@kroah.com> References: <1243628376-22905-4-git-send-email-ebiederm@xmission.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Cc: Andrew Morton , Greg Kroah-Hartman , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, Tejun Heo , Cornelia Huck , linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org, Kay Sievers , "Eric W. Biederman" To: "Eric W. Biederman" Return-path: Received: from kroah.org ([198.145.64.141]:58449 "EHLO coco.kroah.org" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1753989AbZFDABN (ORCPT ); Wed, 3 Jun 2009 20:01:13 -0400 Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <1243628376-22905-4-git-send-email-ebiederm@xmission.com> Sender: linux-fsdevel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: On Fri, May 29, 2009 at 01:19:14PM -0700, Eric W. Biederman wrote: > From: Eric W. Biederman > > kobj->sd can not be NULL in sysfs_remove_dir. > > sysfs_remove_dir is only called from kobject_add (to clean up after failure) > and from kobject_del at the end of a kobject's life. In both cases kobject_add > has already called sysfs_create_dir successfully. The only writers of > kobj->sd are sysfs_create_dir on sucess and sysfs_remove_dir when it clears > the kobj just before deleting the directory. > > Which means at the time sysfs_remove_dir is called kobj->sd will be > valid. Yeah, we would hope so. But as we have been forced to add many checks like this into the driver core to handle those "no one could ever call this" type problems that have been springing up over time, I am hesitant to remove this check. Why do you want to remove it, what is the problem here you are trying to solve? thanks, greg k-h