Subject: [RFC] dev->refcnt long term holder

From: Eric Dumazet <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 16 Nov 2009 19:01:37 +0100

time ip link del eth3.103 ; time ip link del eth3.104 ; time ip link del eth3.105

real	0m0.266s
user	0m0.000s
sys	0m0.001s

real	0m0.770s
user	0m0.000s
sys	0m0.000s

real	0m1.022s
user	0m0.000s
sys	0m0.000s

One problem of current schem in vlan dismantle phase is the
holding of device done by following chain :

vlan_dev_stop() ->
	netif_carrier_off(dev) ->
		linkwatch_fire_event(dev) ->
			dev_hold() ...

And __linkwatch_run_queue() run up to one second later...

Is following patch one way to avoid the problem, or should
we add a new linkwatch_forgetpro_device(dev) method to immediately
release the device reference (and unlink device from the list) ?
(This would probably need a doubly linked list instead of single link list)

Thanks

diff --git a/net/8021q/vlan_dev.c b/net/8021q/vlan_dev.c
index 4198ec5..17216f9 100644
--- a/net/8021q/vlan_dev.c
+++ b/net/8021q/vlan_dev.c
@@ -512,7 +512,6 @@ static int vlan_dev_stop(struct net_device *dev)
 	if (compare_ether_addr(dev->dev_addr, real_dev->dev_addr))
 		dev_unicast_delete(real_dev, dev->dev_addr);
 
-	netif_carrier_off(dev);
 	return 0;
 }