Man page 9 : device_initialize

device_initialize - init device structure.

void device_initialize(struct device *  dev );

dev
    device.

This prepares the device for use by other layers by initializing its fields. It is the first half of device_register, if called by that function, though it can also be called separately, so one may use devAqs fields. In particular, get_device/put_device may be used for reference counting of dev after calling this function.

All fields in dev must be initialized by the caller to 0, except for those explicitly set to some other value. The simplest approach is to use kzalloc to allocate the structure containing dev.

Use put_device to give up your reference instead of freeing dev directly once you have called this function.