proc 2/2: remove struct proc_dir_entry::owner

Setting ->owner as done currently (pde->owner = THIS_MODULE) is racy
as correctly noted at bug #12454. Someone can lookup entry with NULL
->owner, thus not pinning enything, and release it later resulting
in module refcount underflow.

We can keep ->owner and supply it at registration time like ->proc_fops
and ->data.

But this leaves ->owner as easy-manipulative field (just one C assignment)
and somebody will forget to unpin previous/pin current module when
switching ->owner. ->proc_fops is declared as "const" which should give
some thoughts.

->read_proc/->write_proc were just fixed to not require ->owner for
protection.

rmmod'ed directories will be empty and return "." and ".." -- no harm.
And directories with tricky enough readdir and lookup shouldn't be modular.
We definitely don't want such modular code.

Removing ->owner will also make PDE smaller.

So, let's nuke it.

Kudos to Jeff Layton for reminding about this, let's say, oversight.

http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12454

Signed-off-by: Alexey Dobriyan <adobriyan@gmail.com>

1 files changed, 0 insertions, 2 deletions

diff --git a/arch/ia64/kernel/palinfo.c b/arch/ia64/kernel/palinfo.c
index e5c57f4..a4f19c7 100644
--- a/arch/ia64/kernel/palinfo.c
+++ b/arch/ia64/kernel/palinfo.c
@@ -1002,8 +1002,6 @@ create_palinfo_proc_entries(unsigned int cpu)
 		*pdir = create_proc_read_entry(
 				palinfo_entries[j].name, 0, cpu_dir,
 				palinfo_read_entry, (void *)f.value);
-		if (*pdir)
-			(*pdir)->owner = THIS_MODULE;
 		pdir++;
 	}
 }