Re: [GIT PULL 3/6] ARM: SoC driver updates for 5.1

From: Linus Torvalds
Date: Wed Mar 06 2019 - 13:28:52 EST


On Wed, Mar 6, 2019 at 10:16 AM Russell King - ARM Linux admin
<linux@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Would it be worth splitting up mod_devicetable.h and having drivers
> include just the bus-specific device table header(s) that the driver
> requires?

That would certainly help rebuilds when it changes.

But maybe those changes are just not common enough to worry about, and
maybe it would result in more maintenance pain. Who knows?

I just wanted to mention it since it surprised me and I spent the few
minutes to figure out what the offending header file was, and see if
somebody feels motivated.

It does seem a bit pointless and wrong to have the core acpi.h header
file include this, and then cause files to be recompiled just because
some entirely unrelated device ID model changed.

So maybe it would indeed be better having each device type have its
own header file ("include/linux/acpi_devicetable.h"), and then for the
(few) cases that might want to handle _any_ type could include that
"mod_devicetable.h" that then just aggregates them?

But as mentioned, I'm not sure it's worth it, just throwing this issue
out to see what people think.

Linus