[PATCH 081/117] Staging: hv: vmbus: Introduce a lock to protect the ext field in hv_device

[Greg KH]

On Fri, Jul 15, 2011 at 10:47:09AM -0700, K. Y. Srinivasan wrote:
> The current mechanism for handling references in broken.
> Introduce a lock to protect the ext field in hv_device.

Why would that lock ever be needed?  How can things change to this
pointer in different ways like you are thinking it could?  Doesn't the
reference counting in the device itself handle this properly?

greg k-h