>>>> 2. Restrict it to s390x only. It always returned 0 on other >>>> architectures, I was not able to find any user. >>>> >>>> I think 2 should be safe to do (never used on other archs). I do wonder >>>> what the feelings are about 1. >>> >>> Please don't add any s390-specific workarounds here, that does not >>> really sound like a clean-up, rather the opposite. >> >> People seem to have different opinions here. I'm happy as long as we can >> get rid of it (either now, or in the future with a new model). >> >>> >>> That being said, I do not really see the benefit of this change at >>> all. As Michal mentioned, there really should be some more fundamental >>> change. And from the rest of this thread, it also seems that phys_device >>> usage might not be the biggest issue here. >>> >> >> As I already expressed, I am more of a friend of small, incremental >> changes than having a single big world switch where everything will be >> shiny and perfect. >> >> (Deprecating it now - in any way - stops any new users from appearing - >> both, in the kernel and from user space - eventually making the big >> world switch later a little easier because there is one thing less that >> vanished) > > Realistically people do not care about deprecation all that much. They > simply use whatever they can find or somebody will show them. Really, > deprecation has never really worked. The only thing that worked was to > remove the functionality and then wait for somebody to complain and > revert or somehow allow the functionality without necessity to alter the > userspace. Mainframe people are usually ... more conservative (well, they focus on stability and pay a lot of money for that - including HW). :) What they would lose here is s390x lsmem/chmem functionality, used to manage standby memory (under LPAR and z/VM, if enabled) - with the old tools. I have the feeling that this would be acceptable (I never had access to an LPAR that allowed for it ...), but yeah, you never now. > > As much as I would like to remove as much crud as possible I strongly > suspect that the existing hotplug interface is just a lost case and it > doesn't make for the best used time to put a lip stick on a pig. Even if > we remove this particular interface we are not going to get rid of a lot > of code or we won't gain any more sensible semantic, right? > Excluding some documentation drivers/base/memory.c | 29 ----------------------------- drivers/s390/char/sclp_cmd.c | 7 ------- include/linux/memory.h | 2 -- 3 files changed, 38 deletions(-) Seems like this is the only way to deprecate. (I mean I can add comments in the code, but as you say, doesn't stop new user space users from showing up) -- Thanks, David / dhildenb
