Bug 198189

I've been trying to debug a recent problem that's happened on my Turris Omnia router running v3.9 with kernel 4.4.105 (I downgraded it to 4.4.103). It was fine on the previous version - 3.8.6 that was running kernel 4.4.96. What happened was that when trying to connect to the router using ftp (the router is running vsftpd) the process would hang indefinitely, and trying to kill it was impossible. 

My hunt to find the problem led me to this commit:
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git/commit/?h=linux-4.4.y&id=2417da3f4d6bc4fc6c77f613f0e2264090892aa5

When reverting that, it started working normally again.

It seems to be stuck in an endless loop in netdev_wait_allrefs, which is confirmed by a bunch of "netdev_wait_allrefs msleep" messages in the kernel log.

I did some further debugging, and I know it enters the unregister_netdevice_many function, which then calls rollback_registered_many and that sends the NETDEV_UNREGISTER event to all of the registered net devices. But for some reason, when it later enters the netdev_run_todo function and finally netdev_wait_allrefs, the percpu refs is 0 for all interfaces but one - 'lo', the loopback interface.
This is a problem because when ipv6 (ipv6/route.c/ip6_route_dev_notify) receives the NETDEV_UNREGISTER event from netdev_wait_allrefs, it won't actually unregister the device, because reg_state will have been set to NETREG_UNREGISTERED in netdev_run_todo, which the above commit added.

I'm not sure what the solution here would be - I'm assuming the above commit fixes something critical? If not, can it be reversed?
The other option would be to find out why no all percpu refs are cleared on the lo interface.