Re: [dpdk-dev] [PATCH v3 1/2] ethdev: free all common data when releasing port

[Andrew Rybchenko <arybchenko@solarflare.com>]

On 10/16/18 3:22 PM, Thomas Monjalon wrote:
> 16/10/2018 13:16, Andrew Rybchenko:
>> On 10/15/18 2:20 AM, Thomas Monjalon wrote:
>>> This is a clean-up of common ethdev data freeing.
>>> All data freeing are moved to rte_eth_dev_release_port()
>>> and done only in case of primary process.
>>>
>>> It is probably fixing some memory leaks for PMDs which were
>>> not freeing all data.
> [...]
>> In general it looks good, really big work, but ideally it should be
>> acked by cxgbe maintainer as well.
> Actually, after more thoughts, I think this patch is not correct.
> It is freeing MAC adresses in ethdev, even if there was no specific
> allocation done for it in the PMD. Only the PMD can know what are the
> memory blocks to free.
> And it is the same for data->dev_private: are we sure it has been malloc'ed?
> Are we sure it has not been allocated as part of a bigger block?
> Historically, ethdev was freeing data->dev_private in some cases.
> So maybe we can keep this assumption.
> Or we can move all data freeing to the PMD?

It is allocated in rte_eth_dev_create(), rte_eth_vdev_allocate(),
rte_eth_dev_pci_allocate() and some PMDs. I can't say that I'm happy
with it, but it could be really required. May be it should be default
behaviour and if PMD wants override it, just free before and
set dev_private to NULL.