The individual drivers' remove functions could legitimately attempt to access this information (for logging messages if nothing else). Note that I did not in fact observe a problem anywhere, but I came across this while looking into the reasons for what turned out to need the fix at https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/3/5/336 to vsprintf(). Signed-off-by: Jan Beulich --- drivers/xen/xenbus/xenbus_probe.c | 3 ++- 1 file changed, 2 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-) --- 3.3-rc6/drivers/xen/xenbus/xenbus_probe.c +++ 3.3-rc6-xenbus-remove-details/drivers/xen/xenbus/xenbus_probe.c @@ -257,11 +257,12 @@ int xenbus_dev_remove(struct device *_de DPRINTK("%s", dev->nodename); free_otherend_watch(dev); - free_otherend_details(dev); if (drv->remove) drv->remove(dev); + free_otherend_details(dev); + xenbus_switch_state(dev, XenbusStateClosed); return 0; }