Re: [PATCH] locking/lock_events: no need to check return value of debugfs_create functions

From: Greg Kroah-Hartman
Date: Mon Nov 09 2020 - 05:03:13 EST


On Mon, Nov 09, 2020 at 05:51:56PM +0800, Tiezhu Yang wrote:
> On 11/09/2020 04:32 PM, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> > On Sat, Nov 07, 2020 at 05:19:13PM +0800, Tiezhu Yang wrote:
> > > When calling debugfs functions, there is no need to ever check the
> > > return value. The function can work or not, but the code logic should
> > > never do something different based on this.
> > I strongly disagree and have told this to Greg before. Having half a
> > debug interface is weird at best, so upon failure we remove the whole
> > thing, which is consistent.
>
> Hi Peter,
>
> Thanks for your reply.
>
> I find the early discussion and see the following opinion by Greg:
>
> https://lore.kernel.org/patchwork/patch/1290162/
>
> [ For debugfs, this isn't an issue, what can a user do with something like
> "debugfs isn't working? What does that mean???"
>
> And if we _really_ want warnings like this, it should go into the
> debugfs core, not require this to be done for every debugfs user, right?

The debugfs core does spit out a warning when this happens, so no need
to duplicate it in your code as well.

And for subsystems that _really_ want to check this, that's fine, it's
the minority for the whole tree, but please, document it well with a
comment on the check so that it doesn't get "cleanup" patches sent for
it in the future.

thanks,

greg k-h