Re: [PATCH v7 1/2] devcoredump: remove the useless gfp_t parameter in dev_coredumpv and dev_coredumpm

[Brian Norris]

Hi,

On Thu, Aug 18, 2022 at 8:47 AM <duoming@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Thu, 18 Aug 2022 16:58:01 +0200 Greg KH wrote:
> > No, that is not necessary.  Do the work now so that there is no flag day
> > and you don't have to worry about new users, it will all "just work".
>
> Do you mean we should replace dev_set_name() in dev_coredumpm() to some other
> functions that could work both in interrupt context and process context?

No.

I believe the suggestion is that rather than change the signature for
dev_coredumpv() (which means everyone has to agree on the new
signature on day 1), you should introduce a new API, like
dev_coredumpv_noatomic() (I'm not good at naming [1]) with the
signature you want, and then migrate users over. Once we have a
release with no users of the old API, we drop it.

There are plenty of examples of the kernel community doing similar
transitions. You can search around for examples, but a quick search of
my own shows something like this:
https://lwn.net/Articles/735887/
(In particular, timer_setup() was introduced, and all setup_timer()
users were migrated to it within a release or two.)

Brian

[1] Seriously, dev_coredumpv_noatomic() is not a name I want to see
last very long. Maybe some other trivial modification? Examples:

dev_core_dumpv()
dev_coredump_v()
device_coredumpv()
...