I have a devicetree for a custom board with several nodes with no applicable reg property, such as: / { backlight { compatible = "pwm-backlight"; }; gpio-keys { compatible = "gpio-keys"; }; rotary-encoder { compatible = "rotary-encoder"; }; }; These nodes are then registered as devices with unique names: $ ls /sys/devices gpio_keys.8/ rotary_encoder.9/ backlight.6/ ... among others. The uniqueness is guaranteed by of_device_make_bus_id() which uses a global counter for all nodes with no reg property. The relevant snippet is: [..] /* * No BusID, use the node name and add a globally incremented * counter (and pray...) */ magic = atomic_add_return(1, &bus_no_reg_magic); dev_set_name(dev, "%s.%d", node->name, magic - 1); Two nodes can't have the same name and get registered, hence my confusion: Is the unique number addition absolutely necessary? What am I missing here? Isn't a bit problematic to register devices with names that depend solely on probe order (i.e. non-deterministic)? For instance, hotplug event listeners matching the device name may fail if the device suddenly change for whatever reason. Regards, -- Ezequiel Garcia, VanguardiaSur www.vanguardiasur.com.ar -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe devicetree" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html