Re: [PATCH v2 5/7] driver core: Add device location to "struct device" and expose it in sysfs

[Greg Kroah-Hartman]

On Tue, Jun 30, 2020 at 03:00:34PM +0200, Rafael J. Wysocki wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 30, 2020 at 2:52 PM Greg Kroah-Hartman
> <gregkh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > On Tue, Jun 30, 2020 at 01:49:48PM +0300, Heikki Krogerus wrote:
> > > On Mon, Jun 29, 2020 at 09:49:41PM -0700, Rajat Jain wrote:
> > > > Add a new (optional) field to denote the physical location of a device
> > > > in the system, and expose it in sysfs. This was discussed here:
> > > > https://lore.kernel.org/linux-acpi/20200618184621.GA446639@xxxxxxxxx/
> > > >
> > > > (The primary choice for attribute name i.e. "location" is already
> > > > exposed as an ABI elsewhere, so settled for "site"). Individual buses
> > > > that want to support this new attribute can opt-in by setting a flag in
> > > > bus_type, and then populating the location of device while enumerating
> > > > it.
> > >
> > > So why not just call it "physical_location"?
> >
> > That's better, and will allow us to put "3rd blue plug from the left,
> > 4th row down" in there someday :)
> >
> > All of this is "relative" to the CPU, right?  But what CPU?  Again, how
> > are the systems with drawers of PCI and CPUs and memory that can be
> > added/removed at any point in time being handled here?  What is
> > "internal" and "external" for them?
> >
> > What exactly is the physical boundry here that is attempting to be
> > described?
> 
> Also, where is the "physical location" information going to come from?

Who knows?  :)

Some BIOS seem to provide this, but do you trust that?

> If that is the platform firmware (which I suspect is the anticipated
> case), there may be problems with reliability related to that.

s/may/will/

which means making the kernel inact a policy like this patch series
tries to add, will result in a lot of broken systems, which is why I
keep saying that it needs to be done in userspace.

It's as if some of us haven't been down this road before and just keep
being ignored...

{sigh}

greg k-h