Re: [RFC PATCH] hwmon: remove tautological dependency expressions from Kconfig

From: Guenter Roeck

Date: Wed Jul 29 2026 - 23:00:16 EST


On 7/29/26 14:54, Laszlo Ersek wrote:
Commit 554b3529fe01 ("thermal/drivers/core: Remove the module Kconfig's
option") [1] obviated some of the "Optional dependencies" (as described in
"Documentation/kbuild/kconfig-language.rst") in "drivers/hwmon/Kconfig".

Namely, said commit restricted the valid/possible subset of the full
Cartesian product "CONFIG_THERMAL x CONFIG_THERMAL_OF" to

{ (n, n), (y, n), (y, y) }

through "drivers/thermal/Kconfig". Numerically (using tristate values),
this set can be expressed as:

{ (0, 0), (2, 0), (2, 2) }

Over this set, the "drivers/hwmon/Kconfig" tristate expression

THERMAL || !THERMAL_OF

or equivalently,

max(THERMAL, 2-THERMAL_OF)

invariably evaluates to "y" (2).

Similarly, with THERMAL having been restricted to

{ n, y }

or numerically,

{ 0, 2 }

the "drivers/hwmon/Kconfig" tristate expression

THERMAL || THERMAL=n

or equivalently,

max(THERMAL, THERMAL=0)

invariably evaluates to "y" (2). (Note that "THERMAL=0" returns either "y"
(2) or "n" (0).)

Commit f37353320ee9 ("hwmon/drivers/core: Simplify complex dependency")
[2], which is the final commit of the series that [1] is the beginning of,
cleaned up the hwmon C source code in fact; however, it missed the
now-collapsed dependencies in Kconfig. At the time of [2], six of today's
such dependencies were present in Kconfig. Since then, two more have been
added (such that they persist, anyway): one by commit 4f8d374b770a
("hwmon: (max6650) add thermal cooling device capability"), which was
independent of the above-noted series, and another by commit 9855caf5d4eb
("hwmon: add driver for the hwmon parts of qnap-mcu devices"), which was a
descendant of the series.

Remove these always-"y" dependencies.


Dependencies such as "THERMAL || THERMAL=n" were supposed to enable the
driver to be built as module or into the kernel if THERMAL=n, and to
force it to be built as module if THERMAL=m. However, both THERMAL
and THERMAL_OF are boolean, so this really does not make sense.

Applied.

Thanks,
Guenter