The "environmental" rules for authors of any new tc actions are:

1) If you stealeth or borroweth any packet thou shalt be branching
from the righteous path and thou shalt cloneth.

For example if your action queues a packet to be processed later,
or intentionally branches by redirecting a packet, then you need to
clone the packet.

2) If you munge any packet thou shalt call pskb_expand_head in the case
someone else is referencing the skb. After that you "own" the skb.

3) Dropping packets you don't own is a no-no. You simply return
TC_ACT_SHOT to the caller and they will drop it.

The "environmental" rules for callers of actions (qdiscs etc) are:

*) Thou art responsible for freeing anything returned as being
TC_ACT_SHOT/STOLEN/QUEUED. If none of TC_ACT_SHOT/STOLEN/QUEUED is
returned, then all is great and you don't need to do anything.

Post on netdev if something is unclear.