Hi all, For those of you who would have missed the last episodes of the "how to get i2c 2.8 into Linux 2.4", here's a quick summary of the situation. I have been sending three waves of patches to Marcelo. The first wave was completely accepted. The second had 40% rejected. The third was almost completely rejected. It is clear that Marcelo doesn't want any more change to the i2c core in Linux 2.4, unless these are bug fixes. I cannot blame him for that. The changes we wanted to do are far from being trivial. What's more, as I worked on these patches, I could see that our new locking mechanism is incomplete, and our module usage counters are broken. Even if Marcelo was less difficult to convince, I would *not* want to propose something obviously broken for inclusion into Linux 2.4. As Linux 2.4.25 was released, I had to rebuild a new patchset so that people can use both lm_sensors and other i2c stuff with that kernel, like I have been doing since release 2.4.21. It took me something like 3 or 4 hours. I don't plan to do it again. It was OK to make these patches as a temporary solution. It doesn't make sense as a definitive one. Since we won't have our i2c subsystem in Linux 2.4, ever, this means that we have to make ours compatible again. This may sound like a regression, and it's kind of, admitedly, but face the truth: this change belonged to Linux 2.5 and should never have been kept in the 2.4 branch. I don't know exactly how this can be done, since I don't much know the internals of i2c-core and i2c-proc. However I see two possibilities: 1* Revert just everything to the old module usage count mechanism. This means changing every and all of our drivers. 2* If this is technically possible, make the new and old mechanisms work together. What I have in mind sounds like "if it has .inc_use/.dec_use, call it, else it must be using the new mechanism, use .owner". The problem is that I just don't know which part of the system handles that. Is it i2c-proc? Is it i2c-core? Or something deeper into the kernel? As far as the structures are concerned, this would mean having both .inc_use/.dec_use and .owner in them, with .owner last as to not break compatibility with the kernel drivers that are still using non-C99 initializers. Drivers would have to use either of them, but not both. Since I don't know much how this has to be done, the help of everyone, especially Ky?sti, is welcome. BTW, Ky?sti, some times ago you told us you were working on fixing things on i2c. We did not hear from you since. Whatever code changes you have, please discuss them with us if you plan to commit them to the repository. I'd like to avoid what happened last time when you commited so many changes at once that everyone was left puzzled. Thanks. -- Jean Delvare http://www.ensicaen.ismra.fr/~delvare/
