ence.
To keep things simple, we take the reference nevertheless.

Jay Fenlason wrote:
> there's no way for the core to tell cdev "this card is gone,
> kill any inbound transactions on it", while cdev holds the transaction
> open until userspace issues a SEND_RESPONSE ioctl, which may be a very,
> very long time.  But when it does, it calls fw_send_response(), which
> will dereference the card...
>
> So how unhappy are we about userspace potentially holding a fw_card
> open forever?

While termination of inbound transcations at card removal could be
implemented, it is IMO not worth the effort.  Currently, the effect of
holding a reference of a card that has been removed is to block the
process that called the pci_remove of the card.  This is
  - either a user process ran by root.  Root can find and kill processes
    that have /dev/fw* open, if desired.
  - a kernel thread (which one?) in case of hot removal of a PCCard or
    ExpressCard.
The latter case could be a problem indeed.  firewire-core's card
shutdown and card release should probably be improved not to block in
shutdown, just to defer freeing of memory until release.

This is not a new problem though; the same already always happens with
the client->device->card without the need of inbound transactions or
other special conditions involved, other than the client not closing the
file.

Signed-off-by: Stefan Richter <stefanr@s5r6.in-berlin.de>
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