Re: [Ksummit-discuss] [TECH TOPIC] Fix devm_kzalloc, its users, or both

[Julia Lawall <julia.lawall@lip6.fr>]

On Sun, 2 Aug 2015, Russell King - ARM Linux wrote:

> On Fri, Jul 31, 2015 at 12:41:24PM -0700, Dmitry Torokhov wrote:
> > On Fri, Jul 31, 2015 at 11:40:39AM -0700, James Bottomley wrote:
> > > Russell says, this looks to be an orthogonal problem to devm_kzalloc.
> > 
> > Yes, it is except that devm_* is magical and people expect it to somehow
> > release resources only at the right time.
> 
> Who's been selling it as such?  If it's been mis-sold, then maybe there's
> a responsibility on people who see such mis-selling of the API to correct
> those creating this fantasy, rather than ignoring it.
> 
> People try to create APIs which ease the burden of review, and then other
> people go around selling it as the worlds cure to hunger.  If no one
> bothers to correct those doing the mis-selling, then that's not the fault
> of the API.  That's a community problem.  Don't blame the API.

I don't know who is selling it as a cure to everything, but I have seen 
comments from developers that are along the lines of everyone else is 
using devm_xxx, so my use of it should be correct too.

KVM has a "Code Transitions" page (http://wiki.qemu.org/CodeTransitions).  
Such a page could be a place to collect expertise on when a change can and 
cannot be made.  Of course someone would have to maintain it, but perhaps 
maintainers who saw something done wrong a tiresome number of times would 
take care of it.

julia