veto CONFIG_MTD_PARTITIONS?

veto CONFIG_MTD_PARTITIONS?

[Artem Bityutskiy]

Hi,

we have a very small mtdpart driver which provides very basic mtd
partitioning services. And this driver may be compiled out. This
probably mattered many years ago, when saving ~7KiB (on arm arch)
mattered a lot.

But this creates mess:

[dedekind@eru l2-mtd-2.6]$ grep -r CONFIG_MTD_PARTITIONS drivers/mtd/* |
wc -l
132

We have really a lot of these "#ifdef CONFIG_MTD_PARTITIONS" statements,
nearly in every driver. And new drivers have this.

I think it is time to declare than saving ~7KiB is not worth the mess
anymore and veto CONFIG_MTD_PARTITIONS - no new "#ifdef
CONFIG_MTD_PARTITIONS" should be accepted.

Someone should just make mtdpart.c to be an integral part of the MTD
core and remove all those #ifdefs.

Hopefully we'll force someone to clean this up.

If no one strongly disagrees, let's veto CONFIG_MTD_PARTITIONS usage.

-- 
Best Regards,
Artem Bityutskiy (Артём Битюцкий)

Re: veto CONFIG_MTD_PARTITIONS?

[Artem Bityutskiy]

On Fri, 2011-04-15 at 13:09 +0300, Artem Bityutskiy wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> we have a very small mtdpart driver which provides very basic mtd
> partitioning services. And this driver may be compiled out. This
> probably mattered many years ago, when saving ~7KiB (on arm arch)
> mattered a lot.
> 
> But this creates mess:
> 
> [dedekind@eru l2-mtd-2.6]$ grep -r CONFIG_MTD_PARTITIONS drivers/mtd/* |
> wc -l
> 132
> 
> We have really a lot of these "#ifdef CONFIG_MTD_PARTITIONS" statements,
> nearly in every driver. And new drivers have this.
> 
> I think it is time to declare than saving ~7KiB is not worth the mess
> anymore and veto CONFIG_MTD_PARTITIONS - no new "#ifdef
> CONFIG_MTD_PARTITIONS" should be accepted.
> 
> Someone should just make mtdpart.c to be an integral part of the MTD
> core and remove all those #ifdefs.
> 
> Hopefully we'll force someone to clean this up.
> 
> If no one strongly disagrees, let's veto CONFIG_MTD_PARTITIONS usage.

OK, since no one disagreed, and tglx explicitly agreed in the mtd chat,
and dwmw2 kind of supported this, let's prohibit more
CONFIG_MTD_PARTITIONS usage and try to force people to clean this up.

I've updated the MTD web site with this information:
http://www.linux-mtd.infradead.org/doc/general.html#L_partitions_ban

-- 
Best Regards,
Artem Bityutskiy (Артём Битюцкий)