Re: [PATCH] bus: subsys: propagate errors from subsys interface's ->add_dev()

["Rafael J. Wysocki" <rjw@rjwysocki.net>]

On Friday, July 31, 2015 11:39:07 AM Viresh Kumar wrote:
> On 30-07-15, 20:53, Rafael J. Wysocki wrote:
> > Well, on ACPI systems we actually do probe CPU devices.  We have a processor
> > driver there that binds to CPU devices and the cpufreq driver is just a
> > frontend to that.
> 
> Hmm, maybe I need to look at that in detail..
> 
> > So question is what prevents DT-based systems from doing it analogously.
> 
> Don't have an answer to it yet.
> 
> > Now, even if you use a fake platform device for that (I'm sure there are
> > reasons for doing that, but I'd very much like them to be explained),
> 
> The other reason apart from the EPROBE_DEFER thing was to identify the
> right driver for a platform. For multiplatform kernels, there can be
> multiple cpufreq drivers present in the kernel and there was no other
> way to identify the right driver platform wants to probe.
> 
> > then
> > all of the information on dependencies should already be available to the
> > ->probe callback of that device's driver, so it can check them before
> > registering the cpufreq interface, can't it?
> 
> That's what we try to do today for cpufreq-dt, for example. But that
> has to be done for every possible policy the system can have as all
> might have separate resources to allocate. For cpufreq-dt, we do it
> only for cpu0 today, and assume others will work as well if cpu0 can.
> 
> The real deal is that we need a probe() per policy here, for which
> init() fitted well :)
> 
> > Essentially, what you're suggesting to do is something like: Make the ->probe
> > of one device's driver register a subsys interface for a specific bus type
> > and check what ->add_dev of that interface returns for each device on that
> > bus and if that is -EPROBE_DEFER, return it as its own return value.  Do you
> > honestly think this is a good design?
> 
> No. I don't really thing so. That's why I was asking for suggestions
> to do it proper. Maybe processor driver is the way to look for, I will
> investigate further on that.
> 
> But until the time that is done, and I expect that to take some time,
> can't we check the return value of ->add_dev()?

As I said, either do it everywhere, or do it nowhere (in which case it can
be void).  Doing it in one place only is plain confusing and generally
incorrect.

Thanks,
Rafael