On Wed, Nov 13, 2013 at 01:13:06PM -0700, Stephen Warren wrote:
> On 11/13/2013 12:07 PM, Mark Brown wrote:

> > This isn't really regulator specific - it's something that applies
> > in general to things implementing deferred probing - so we ought to
> > have a generic "we know if devices can appear later or not" flag
> > that subsystems can check.

> I guess I misunderstand then, since given that modules exist, wouldn't
> that flag always be true?

No, with DT you can say that if there is no DT binding configuring a
given thing (clock, regulator, GPIO or whatever) then no amount of
module loading will ever cause it to appear - this is what the flag in
question controls.

> IIUC, the issue being discussed here isn't about deferred probe at
> all. You always must defer probe if an object is specified as existing
> yet the provider isn't available yet. The issue here is when a
> regulator isn't specified as existing, yet something asks for that
> regulator, should the regulator subsystem automatically provide a
> dummy regulator instead, rather than erroring out.

No, it's a deferred probing thing - one of the effects here is that
we're choosing between deferring waiting for the resource we know is
bound to appear and substituting a dummy for something we know exists
physically and we know can never be provided by software.