Hi Wim, All watchdog drivers include: MODULE_ALIAS_MISCDEV(WATCHDOG_MINOR); which causes a modalias char-major-10-130 to be added to every watchdog driver module. As a result, any access to /dev/watchdog on a system with no watchdog driver loaded and working will result in an attempt to load several dozen drivers. At best one or two will actually work, the others will: * Waste time failing to load. * Waste memory succeeding to load but not finding any device to bind to. * Pollute the kernel log. * Sometimes even load while they should not and break the system. I just had a report about advantechwdt doing that on some systems. And the attempt order will presumably be random, so it might as well load softdog before a hardware-based watchdog which would have been preferred. This looks so 90s. Drivers for enumerated devices have hardware-based modaliases, so char-major-10-130 shouldn't be needed. Other drivers should certainly not be loaded randomly if they need to poke the hardware to detect the presence of a supported device. My opinion is that the char-major-10-130 modalias should ONLY be defined by user-space, when the user knows he/she needs a watchdog driver which doesn't support auto-loading via hardware-based auto-loading. So, can we please get rid of all these MODULE_ALIAS_MISCDEV(WATCHDOG_MINOR) statements? They do more harm than good as far as I can see. Thanks, -- Jean Delvare Suse L3 -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-watchdog" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
