Setting ->owner as done currently (pde->owner = THIS_MODULE) is racy
as correctly noted at bug #12454. Someone can lookup entry with NULL
->owner, thus not pinning enything, and release it later resulting
in module refcount underflow.
We can keep ->owner and supply it at registration time like ->proc_fops
and ->data.
But this leaves ->owner as easy-manipulative field (just one C assignment)
and somebody will forget to unpin previous/pin current module when
switching ->owner. ->proc_fops is declared as "const" which should give
some thoughts.
->read_proc/->write_proc were just fixed to not require ->owner for
protection.
rmmod'ed directories will be empty and return "." and ".." -- no harm.
And directories with tricky enough readdir and lookup shouldn't be modular.
We definitely don't want such modular code.
Removing ->owner will also make PDE smaller.
So, let's nuke it.
Kudos to Jeff Layton for reminding about this, let's say, oversight.
http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12454
Signed-off-by: Alexey Dobriyan <adobriyan@gmail.com>