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/fs/nfs/client.c b/fs/nfs/client.c
index 574158ae239..2277421656e 100644
--- a/fs/nfs/client.c
+++ b/fs/nfs/client.c
@@ -1606,8 +1606,6 @@ int __init nfs_fs_proc_init(void)
 	if (!proc_fs_nfs)
 		goto error_0;
 
-	proc_fs_nfs->owner = THIS_MODULE;
-
 	/* a file of servers with which we're dealing */
 	p = proc_create("servers", S_IFREG|S_IRUGO,
 			proc_fs_nfs, &nfs_server_list_fops);