Re: [PATCH 04/14] init: deps: order network interfaces by link order

[Linus Torvalds]

On Sat, Oct 17, 2015 at 10:14 AM, Alexander Holler <holler@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Assuming three different ethernet-drivers, without any special code,
> the dependency graph would not require any special order inbetween them
> and would look like that:

This seems *fundamentally* wrong.

This is in no way specific to network drivers (or to disk drivers, or
to anything else).

So requiring extra logic for this implies that something is seriously wrong.

If two drivers aren't ordered by dependencies, they should always be
in link order, regardless of any hacks like these. If they're not,
things are wrong.

I think your problem is that you make that dependency thing a separate
ordering, so now it matters whether a driver has a dependency or not.

If something like this is to work, it has to work *with* the normal
ordering, not outside of it and then have these kinds of broken
special cases.

The normal init orderings (ie core -> postcore -> arch -> subsys -> fs
-> rootfs -> device -> late) should just be an extra dependency, I
think.

The way that you just insert the annotated dependencies in between
levels 6 and 7 ("device" and "late") can't be right. It means - for
example - that you can't have subsystems that have dependencies.

So I really think that if we do dependencies, then the current levels
have to be added as dependencies, so that "subsys_initcall(xyz)"
basically means "xyz depends on the 'subsys' event, and 'subsys_end'
depends on xyz". Then within that, you might have another bus driver
that in turn depends on 'xyz'.

Because right now afaik we do have dependencies like that, which we
sort out by link ordering (things like 'drm depends on pci' - I'm not
actually sure that one is true, but it might be).

                     Linus
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