[Qemu-devel] [PULL 4/4] memory: do not add a reference to the owner of aliased regions

[Paolo Bonzini]

Very often the owner of the aliased region is the same as the owner of the alias
region itself.  When this happens, the reference count can never go back to 0 
and
the owner is leaked.  This is for example breaking hot-unplug of virtio-pci
devices (the device cannot be plugged back again with the same id).

Another common use for alias is to transform the system I/O address space
into an MMIO regions; in this case the aliased region never dies, so there
is no problem.  Otherwise the owner is always the same for aliasing
and aliased region.

I checked all calls to memory_region_init_alias introduced after commit
dfde4e6 (memory: add ref/unref calls, 2013-05-06) and they do not need the
reference in order to keep the owner of the aliased region alive.

Reported-by: Michael S. Tsirkin <address@hidden>
Tested-by: Michael S. Tsirkin <address@hidden>
Signed-off-by: Paolo Bonzini <address@hidden>
---
 memory.c | 7 -------
 1 file changed, 7 deletions(-)

diff --git a/memory.c b/memory.c
index 5e5f325..4eb138a 100644
--- a/memory.c
+++ b/memory.c
@@ -859,11 +859,6 @@ static void memory_region_destructor_ram(MemoryRegion *mr)
     qemu_ram_free(mr->ram_addr);
 }
 
-static void memory_region_destructor_alias(MemoryRegion *mr)
-{
-    memory_region_unref(mr->alias);
-}
-
 static void memory_region_destructor_ram_from_ptr(MemoryRegion *mr)
 {
     qemu_ram_free_from_ptr(mr->ram_addr);
@@ -1272,8 +1267,6 @@ void memory_region_init_alias(MemoryRegion *mr,
                               uint64_t size)
 {
     memory_region_init(mr, owner, name, size);
-    memory_region_ref(orig);
-    mr->destructor = memory_region_destructor_alias;
     mr->alias = orig;
     mr->alias_offset = offset;
 }
-- 
2.4.3