On Mon, Nov 3, 2014 at 7:42 PM, Mika Westerberg <mika.westerberg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Mon, Nov 03, 2014 at 09:50:11AM -0600, Felipe Balbi wrote: >> that's an issue that needs solving, but forcing every x86 kernel to ship >> with this driver, is not a proper solution. > > I would rather have the driver build in to the kernel now (and btw it > has been already in mainline quite some time so I suspect many distros > have already enabled it), than turning it module and render some devices > that have been working previously, fail suddenly. We have an analogous problem with large device tree kernels for ARM (supporting a multitude of ARM subarchitectures): a lot of statically compiled-in drivers that just idle around after boot. What would be nice was for the kernel to have a way of marking some platform drivers such that if it has not been probed by init_late(), the entire driver would be discarded, like a module that gets unloaded. When I posed this idea in some forum it was considered "pretty hard to achieve" (plus I guess it runs into the dilemma that we can never discard strings) but I still think it'd be the right thing to do. It'd be very straight-forward for driver authors to annotate their on-chip platform drivers with some MODULE_LATE_DISCARD() or whatever. Yours, Linus Walleij -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe stable" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html