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Doh... true - of course I have in mind the end goal which is making this whole process awfully difficult. Going step by step hasn't really helped as much as it should have /-(. Adjustments to later patches will be necessary to either Unref or EndAPI.
I'm sorry, I don't follow. What changes to later patches are we talking about exactly? I agree with the original approach you took because IMHO it is the most transparent in terms of gradual changes - replacing frees with unrefs or EndAPIs for that matter, and it also keeps things consistent.
Pay no attention to the old man talking to himself ;-) I've gone back to the original 1/12 and just added a virNodeDeviceObjFree within the if (dev) prior to dev_create(udi). Since it doesn't matter if the node device is unlocked it's a safe place to put it. [...]
I'm not sure I follow... Like noted previously trying not to disturb the logic here - just applying a different band-aid
The purpose of the Remove AIUI is to allow the code to rediscover some device because no one wanted to handle the messy situation of some capability being removed or some property being modified. Instead it was deemed a better option to just Remove the device and allow dev_create reinstantiate.
It's been a long time since 2008 and there wasn't a exhausting description why it was a problem back in 2008 - locks maybe?. Commits d48717054c7 and 6244c173b don't really relate to what I'm suggesting, do they? You wouldn't mess around with locks, so you wouldn't regress with deadlock. I'm still trying to figure out what I'm missing here, since you're holding all the necessary locks anyway so what could possibly be the benefit of calling remove on the device prior to creating-refreshing it next.
Erik
I was trying to figure out why you were advocating removing the Find and Remove and just call dev_create directly. AIUI, the code is removing the device and allowing dev_create recreate it because it was easier than deal with def->caps replacement. Sure maybe that's easier today, but it's been way too long for me to recall much about hal other than something to do with 2001: A Space Odyssey ("I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that")... John v4 will be posted soon