On Sat, Mar 09, 2013 at 07:16:43PM +0100, Lars-Peter Clausen wrote: > Currently i2c_del_adapter() returns 0 on success and potentially an error code > on failure. Unfortunately this doesn't mix too well with the Linux device driver > model. An i2c_adapter is usually registered in a drivers probe callback and > removed in the drivers remove callback. The Linux device driver model assumes > that a device may disappear at any time, e.g. because it is on a hot-plug-able > bus and the device is physically removed or because it is unbound from it's > driver. This means that a driver's remove callback is not allowed to fail. This > has lead to code fragments like the following: > > rc = i2c_del_adapter(&board->i2c_adap); > BUG_ON(rc); > > Currently there are two code paths which can cause to i2c_del_adapter() to > return an error code: > 1) If the adapter that is passed to i2c_del_adapter() is not registered > i2c_del_adapter() returns -EINVAL > 2) If an I2C client, which is registered as a child to the adapter, implements > the detach_adapter callback and detach_adapter returns an error the removal of > the adapter is aborted and i2c_del_adapter() returns the error returned by the > clients detach_adapter callback. > > The first probably never happens unless there is a serious bug in the driver > calling i2c_del_adapter(), but I think even then, for the sake of sanitizing the > API we can argue that the purpose of i2c_del_adapter() is to remove the adapter > from the system. If the adapter currently isn't registered this becomes a no-op > and we can return success, without having to do anything. The second also never > happens, since the detach_adapter callback has been deprecated for quite some > time now and there are currently no drivers left which implement it. > > So realisticly i2c_del_adapter() already always returns 0 and all code checking > for errors is more or less dead code. And in fact the majority of the users of > i2c_del_adapter() already ignore the return value, but there are still some > drivers (both newer and older) which assume that i2c_del_adapter() might fail. > This series aims at making it explicit that i2c_del_adapter() can not fail by > making its return type void. > > The series will start by making i2c_del_adapter() always return success. For > this it will update the case, where a non-registered adapter is passed in, to > return 0 instead of -EINVAL and remove all code related to the unused > detach_adapter callback. Afterward the series will update all users of > i2c_del_adapter() to ignore the return value (since it is always 0 now). And > finally the series will change the return type of i2c_del_adapter() to void. > > The same is true for i2c_del_mux_adapter() which is mostly just a wrapper > around i2c_del_adapter(), so it is also updated in this series. Thanks for doing this and thanks to Jean for the review. I pretty much came to the same questions and conclusions. Applied to for-next, thanks! -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-i2c" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
