Reference counts are a commonly used mechanism for tracking the life cycle
of objects in a computing system. As long as every user of an object
correctly maintains its references by incrementing and decrementing the
reference count, that object will persist for as long as it
is needed
and will be properly destroyed once the last user is done. The “correctly”
in that sentence is important, though; things do not work
as well in the presence of reference-counting errors. Networking
developer Eric Dumazet is working on a
reference-count tracking system that could prove useful for finding
these errors in the networking subsystem and, someday, throughout the kernel.
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