On Wed, Oct 21, 2020 at 1:07 PM Daniel Palmer <daniel@xxxxxxxx> wrote: > Sorry to pester you again... Don't worry. I'm more worried that my replies are slow. > Before I do that I have a question that maybe you could help me with: > Andy noted a few times that I have this driver as a built in driver > and not a module. > The gpio-ixp4xx.c driver is also a built in driver. Is there a reason > why it's ok there but not this driver? Not that I know of. There is a lot of push for modularization right now because Android (and other distributions) likes it, so if your SoC could be used by Android or Fedora or Debian etc it is generally a good idea to modularize. These distributions use the generic ARM (etc) kernel and try to load as many drivers as possible as modules. It is not always possible because some GPIOs might be needed very early, such as on-chip GPIO. So you better make sure that the platform can get to userspace also without this driver compiled in, otherwise it *MUST* be bool so people don't get ammunition to shoot themselves in the foot and configure a non-bootable kernel just because they could modularize this driver. If your SoC is only used by OpenWrt (like ixp4xx) then it is fine to just use bool because that distribution is always built with an image for a specific hardware, whereas distributions are generic. So it actually depends a bit on the usecase of the SoC. Yours, Linus Walleij
