On 25.09.2017 18:17, Guenter Roeck wrote:
If a watchdog driver's open function sets WDOG_HW_RUNNING with the expectation that the watchdog can not be stopped, but then stops the watchdog anyway in its stop function, kref_get() wil not be called in watchdog_open(). If the watchdog then stops on close, WDOG_HW_RUNNING will be cleared and kref_put() will be called, causing a kref imbalance. As result the character device data structure will be released, which in turn will cause the system to crash on the next call to watchdog_open().
Ach, ok. I see. So the stop patch should remove it from the start.

