Re: [PATCH] net: usb: lan78xx: add weak dependency with micrel phy module

[Florian Fainelli]

On 7/24/2024 9:25 PM, Lucas De Marchi wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 25, 2024 at 12:57:05AM GMT, Andrew Lunn wrote:
> > > For the commented case, I have included only one phy because it is 
> > > the hardware
> > > that I have, but other phy devices (modules) are possible and they 
> > > can be some.
> >
> > So this the whole whacker a mole problem. It works for you but fails
> > for 99% of users. How is this helping us?
>
> no, this is the first instance that was found/added.
>
> if you declare a softdep what happens is that the dep is loaded first
> (needed or not) and your module is loaded after that
>
> if you declare a weakdep, you are just instructing the tools that the
> module may or may not be needed.  Any module today that does a
> request_module("foo") could be a candidate to migrate from
> MODULE_SOFTDEP("pre: foo") to the new weakdep, as long as it handles
> properly the module being loaded ondemand as opposed to using
> request_module() to just synchronize the module being loaded.
>
> > Maybe a better solution is to first build an initramfs with
> > everything, plus the kitchen sink. Boot it, and then look at what has
> > been loaded in order to get the rootfs mounted. Then update the
> > initramfs with just what is needed? That should be pretty generic,
> > with throw out networking ig NFS root is not used, just load JFFS2 and
> > a NAND driver if it was used for the rootfs, etc.
>
> that works for development systems or if you are fine tuning it for each
> system you have. It doesn't work for a generic distro with the kitchen
> sink of modules and still trying to minimize the initrd without end user
> intervention. So it works for 99% of users.

OK, but 'config USB_LAN78XX' does have a number of 'select' meaning 
those are hard functional dependencies, and so those should be more than 
a hint that these modules are necessary. Why should we encode that 
information twice: once in Kconfig and another time within the module .c 
file itself? Cannot we have better tooling to help build an initramfs 
which does include everything that has been selected?
--
Florian