Exactly. This is not a minor behavior change that can be isolated to
a few drivers. It's a fundamental change in behavior that is widespread
(I mentioned serial drivers specifically as that's what I was concerned
with but you are correct that it affects everything that uses the tty layer).
It's probably a good change to make at some point in the future, but it
needs to happen in a well defined and clearly identifiable way. It would
probably be best for it to happen in the 2.5 tree.
> > Redhat 7.1 included that behavior change in the kernel they shipped
> > and it caused no end of problems for those of us that were doing
> > serial drivers since there was no way to easily identify that the
> > patch had been included.
>
> The change which adds the MOD_DEC_USE_COUNT stuff is bogus, and it
> shouldn't have been made. (I'm assuming this is what you're talking
> about).
Yes. Redhat's default kernel in 7.1 (2.4.2-2 as it identifies itself)
will not call the close() routines if the open() routines return an
error. The real problem isn't that the behavior changed, but that there's
no easy way to tell that they had changed it.
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