On Sat, Mar 16, 2019 at 10:17:11AM +0100, Enrico Weigelt, metux IT consult wrote: > On 16.03.19 04:26, Greg KH wrote: > > > No, it's just that those systems do not allow those devices to be > > removed because they are probably not on a removable bus. > > Ok, devices (hw) might not be removable - that also the case for uarts > builtin some SoCs, or the good old PC w/ 8250. But does that also mean > that the driver should not be removable ? No, but 'rmmod' is not a normal operation that anyone ever does in a working system. It is only for developer's ease-of-use. > IMHO, even if that's the case, it's still inconsistent. The driver then > shouldn't support a remove at all (or even builtin only), not just > incomplete remove. Cleaning up properly when the module is unloaded is a good idea, but so far the patches you submitted did not change anything from a logic point of view. They all just cleaned up memory the same way it was cleaned up before, so I really do not understand what you are trying to do here. > >> Okay, I was on a wrong track here - I had the silly idea that it would > >> make things easier if we'd do it the same way everywhere. > > > > "Consistent" is good, and valid, but touching old drivers that have few > > users is always risky, and you need a solid reason to do so. > > Understood. > > By the way: do we have some people who have those old hw and could test? > Should we (try to) create some ? Perhaps some "tester" entry in > MAINTAINERS file ? (I could ask around several people who might have > lots of old / rare hardware.) Let's not clutter up MAINTAINERS with anything else please. > >> Understood. Assuming I've found some of these cases, shall I use devm > >> oder just add the missing release ? > > > > If it actually makes the code "simpler" or "more obvious", sure, that's > > fine. But churn for churns sake is not ok. > > Ok. > > > I put the review of new patch submissions on hold, yes. Almost all > > maintainers do that as we can not add new patches to our trees at that > > point in time. > > hmm, looks like a pipeline stall ;-) > why not collecting in a separate branch, which later gets rebased to > mainline when rc is out ? I do do that for subsystems that actually have a high patch rate. The tty/serial subsystem is not such a thing, and it can handle 2 weeks of delay just fine. > > And I do have other things I do during that period so it's not like I'm > > just sitting around doing nothing :) > > So it's also a fixed schedule for your other work. Understood. > > It seems that this workflow can confuse people. Few days ago, somebody > became nervous about missing reactions on patches. Your autoresponder > worked for me, but maybe not for everybody. Why would it not work for everybody? Kernel development has been done in this manner for over a decade. Having a 2 week window like this is good for the maintainers, remember they are the most limited resource we have, not developers. thanks, greg k-h
