Re: [PATCH 03/10] mfd / platform: cros_ec: Miscellaneous character device to talk with the EC

[Lee Jones]

On Tue, 04 Jun 2019, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 04, 2019 at 11:39:21AM -0700, Guenter Roeck wrote:
> > On Tue, Jun 4, 2019 at 11:35 AM Greg Kroah-Hartman
> > <gregkh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > >
> > > On Tue, Jun 04, 2019 at 01:58:38PM -0300, Ezequiel Garcia wrote:
> > > > Hey Greg,
> > > >
> > > > > > + dev_info(&pdev->dev, "Created misc device /dev/%s\n",
> > > > > > +          data->misc.name);
> > > > >
> > > > > No need to be noisy, if all goes well, your code should be quiet.
> > > > >
> > > >
> > > > I sometimes wonder about this being noise or not, so I will slightly
> > > > hijack this thread for this discussion.
> > > >
> > > > >From a kernel developer point-of-view, or even from a platform
> > > > developer or user with a debugging hat point-of-view, having
> > > > a "device created" or "device registered" message is often very useful.
> > >
> > > For you, yes.  For someone with 30000 devices attached to their system,
> > > it is not, and causes booting to take longer than it should be.

Who has 30,000 devices attached to their systems?  I would argue that
in these special corner-cases, they should knock the log-level *down*
a notch.  For the rest of us who run normal platforms, an extra second
of boot time renders a more forthcoming/useful system than if each of
our devices initialised silently.

Personally I like to know what devices I have on my system, and the
kernel log is the first place I look.  As far as I'm concerned, for
the most part, if it's not in the kernel log, I don't have it.

 "Oh wow, I didn't know I had XXX functionality on this platform."

In my real job, I am currently enabling some newly released AArch64
based laptops for booting with ACPI.  I must have wasted a day whilst
enabling some of the devices the system relies upon, just to find
out that 90% of them were actually probing semi-fine (at least probe()
was succeeding), just silently. *grumble*

-- 
Lee Jones [æçæ]
Linaro Services Technical Lead
Linaro.org â Open source software for ARM SoCs
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