Re: [PATCH v3 00/20] driver core: count references of the platform device's fwnode, not OF node

On Mon, Jul 06, 2026 at 02:44:12PM +0200, Bartosz Golaszewski wrote:
> Platform device core provides helper interfaces for dealing with
> dynamically created platform devices. Most users should use
> platform_device_register_full() which encapsulates most of the
> operations but some modules will want to use the split approach of
> calling platform_device_alloc() + platform_device_add() separately for
> various reasons.
> 
> With many platform devices now using dynamic software nodes as their
> primary firmware nodes and with the platform device interface being
> extended to also better cover the use-cases of secondary software nodes,
> I believe it makes sense to switch to counting the references of all
> kinds of firmware nodes.
> 
> To that end, I identified all users of platform_device_alloc() that also
> assign dev.of_node or dev.fwnode manually. I noticed five cases where
> the references are not increased as they should (patches 1-5 fix these
> users) and provided three new functions in platform_device.h that now
> become the preferred interfaces for assigning firmware nodes to dynamic
> platform devices (in line with platform_device_add_data(),
> platform_device_add_resources(), etc.). The bulk of the patches in this
> series are small driver conversions to port all users to going through
> the new functions that now encapsulate the refcount logic. With that
> done, the final patch seamlessly switches to counting the references of
> all firmware node types.
> 
> This effort is prerequisite of removing platform_device_release_full()
> and unifying the release path for dynamic platform devices using
> unmanaged software nodes.
> 
> Merging strategy: The entire series should go through the driver core
> tree, possibly with an immutable branch provided to solve any potential
> conflicts though these are rather unlikely.

I've added this to the driver-core-testing branch now, thanks!

greg k-h