Re: [PATCH v2 00/22] mfd: demodularization of non-modular drivers

[Linus Walleij]

On Wed, Dec 5, 2018 at 12:36 PM Charles Keepax
<ckeepax@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Sun, Dec 02, 2018 at 11:23:07PM -0500, Paul Gortmaker wrote:
> > The solution to #4 is similar - we delete the ".remove" function and
> > the binding into the platform_driver struct.  However, since the same
> > ".remove" function could also be triggered by an "unbind" (such as for
> > pass-through of a device to a guest instance)  - so we also explicitly
> > disable any unbind for the driver.
> >
> > The unbind mask allows us to ensure we will see if there was some odd
> > corner case out there that was relying on it.  Typically it would be a
> > multi-port ethernet card passing a port through to a guest, so a
> > sensible use case in MFD drivers seems highly unlikely.  This same
> > solution has already been used in multiple other mainline subsystems.
> >
>
> I guess if this is a general direction thing, but it does seem
> that module unload is not the only reason one might ever unbind a
> driver. So are we sure we want to remove the option to unbind
> these drivers? Certainly for testing it is sometimes useful.

I personally never understood why these attributes are even
present on non-modular drivers.

If testing is about exercising unbind/bind to reintialize
the code through a new call to .probe(), why would the developer
not take it all the way through and make it a module?
It just looks like a half-measure.

Yours,
Linus Walleij