Hi Hans, On Thu, 19 Jul 2007 17:32:10 +0200, Hans de Goede wrote: > As you all know I've been working lately on moving the fscher driver to > individual alarm files and on merging the fscpos driver into the fscher driver. > > While typing a reply to Jean's review of the fscpos support for the fscher > driver, I came to the conclusion that it might be best to remove the watchdog > supporting sysfs attr from these 2 drivers, These sysfs attr are nothing more > then a raw export of the watchdog registers. If people want raw access they can > and should use i2c-dev. Thus I think it would best to just remove the watchdog > sysfs attr, reducing the driver size and complexity. (Repeating what I wrote in another thread, as this new thread is a better place:) I agree that the current watchdog implementation is poor, but you can't rip it away right now without offering a replacement. Either deprecate it and plan it for removal at a later point in time, or replace it with a proper implementation (or both.) Having i2c-dev and a kernel driver access the same chip isn't a good idea, and might no longer work in the future. > Notice that there are no > userspace programs which are currently using these sysfs attr. How can you be sure? Just because nothing in the lm-sensors package uses them, doesn't mean that some users don't have dedicated script using them directly. > Maybe in the future a proper watchdog driver can be written for the watchdog > functions on these chips, under the same subsystem as the other watchdog > drivers, since its an i2c chip, sharing it with other drivers should not be a > problem (I think). As the i2c subsystem is being improved to better follow the driver model, "sharing it with other drivers" doesn't sound good. But nothing prevents you from having a single driver handling both the hardware monitoring function and the watchdog function. The problem with the current driver isn't that it handles both, but only the non-standard watchdog interface. -- Jean Delvare
