Re: [PATCH 0/5] hwmon: New hwmon registration API

From: Guenter Roeck
Date: Fri Jul 08 2016 - 09:48:43 EST


Hi Punit,

On 07/08/2016 02:31 AM, Punit Agrawal wrote:
Hi Guenter,

Guenter Roeck <linux@xxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

Up to now, each hwmon driver has to implement its own sysfs attributes.
This requires a lot of template code, and distracts from the driver's
core function to read and write chip registers.

To be able to reduce driver complexity, move sensor attribute handling
and thermal zone registration into the hwmon core. By using the new API,
driver size is typically reduced by 20-50% depending on driver complexity
and the number of sysfs attributes supported.

The first patch of the series introduces the API as well as support
for temperature sensors. Subsequent patches introduce support for
voltage, current, power, energy, humidity, and fan speed sensors.

The series was tested by converting several drivers (lm75, lm90, tmp102,
tmp421, ltc4245) to the new API. Testing was done with with real chips
as well as with the hwmon driver module test code available at
https://github.com/groeck/module-tests.

I like this series - it takes all of the attributes' handling out of the
individual driver code and moving it to hwmon core.

Having attempted a port of scpi-hwmon.c, I think that driver will not
gain a big savings in line count. Though it'll help separate access to
sensors from sysfs related code - which I think is worth the change.


From what I have seen, savings are for the most part on the binary image size.
I have not seen much if any savings in terms of LOC, though that may in part
be because of my coding style.

Here is the result from the conversions I have done so far.

Old:

text data bss dec hex filename
5730 4056 64 9850 267a drivers/hwmon/lm95245.o
5941 4240 64 10245 2805 drivers/hwmon/lm95241.o
5361 3584 64 9009 2331 drivers/hwmon/jc42.o
8609 10872 64 19545 4c59 drivers/hwmon/max31790.o
9080 13232 64 22376 5768 drivers/hwmon/nct7904.o
6574 8498 64 15136 3b20 drivers/hwmon/ltc4245.o
4516 3464 64 8044 1f6c drivers/hwmon/tmp421.o
4223 2744 64 7031 1b77 drivers/hwmon/tmp102.o
21757 13496 64 35317 89f5 drivers/hwmon/lm90.o
6804 3240 64 10108 277c drivers/hwmon/lm75.o

New:

text data bss dec hex filename
5166 1568 128 6862 1ace drivers/hwmon/lm95245.o
4334 1664 64 6062 17ae drivers/hwmon/lm95241.o
4579 1456 64 6099 17d3 drivers/hwmon/jc42.o
3687 1312 64 5063 13c7 drivers/hwmon/max31790.o
3905 1720 64 5689 1639 drivers/hwmon/nct7904.o
3989 1658 64 5711 164f drivers/hwmon/ltc4245.o
3557 1408 64 5029 13a5 drivers/hwmon/tmp421.o
4037 2200 64 6301 189d drivers/hwmon/tmp102.o
16485 4288 64 20837 5165 drivers/hwmon/lm90.o
5762 2128 64 7954 1f12 drivers/hwmon/lm75.o

This is with x86_64.

The largest savings are in drivers with simple access methods and
a large number of attributes. The scpi driver is somewhat of an
exception since it creates its attribute data structures dynamically;
I would not expect to see much savings in that driver.

FWIW,

Acked-by: Punit Agrawal <punit.agrawal@xxxxxxx>


Thanks!

Guenter