From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1756861AbYEGAzb (ORCPT ); Tue, 6 May 2008 20:55:31 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1753354AbYEGAzW (ORCPT ); Tue, 6 May 2008 20:55:22 -0400 Received: from gate.crashing.org ([63.228.1.57]:59451 "EHLO gate.crashing.org" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1750803AbYEGAzV (ORCPT ); Tue, 6 May 2008 20:55:21 -0400 Subject: Re: [PATCH] Silence 'ignoring return value' warnings in drivers/video/aty/radeon_base.c From: Benjamin Herrenschmidt Reply-To: benh@kernel.crashing.org To: David Miller Cc: akpm@linux-foundation.org, tony@bakeyournoodle.com, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org In-Reply-To: <20080506.144301.233784820.davem@davemloft.net> References: <20080424043400.GS20457@bakeyournoodle.com> <20080506143936.6357e578.akpm@linux-foundation.org> <20080506.144301.233784820.davem@davemloft.net> Content-Type: text/plain Date: Wed, 07 May 2008 10:54:43 +1000 Message-Id: <1210121683.21644.194.camel@pasglop> Mime-Version: 1.0 X-Mailer: Evolution 2.12.1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On Tue, 2008-05-06 at 14:43 -0700, David Miller wrote: > > So I rewrote the title to "drivers/video/aty/radeon_base.c: notify > user if > > sysfs_create_bin_file() failed". > > > > And your fix looks appropriate - if sysfs_create_bin_file() fails we > will now get > > reports of this and we can find out what kernel bug caused this to > happen. > > The last time someone "fixed" this warning in the radeon driver, > people lost their consoles. > > Just giving a heads up... I asked Tony to only warn. I still don't like it tho. As I (and paulus) have explained several times in the past, but I'm not going to veto the patch because I'm tired of that argument. We have something like 99% of users of sysfs_create_file not supposed to fail right ? So what we are effectively doing is adding -hundreds- of printk's all over the place (bloat bloat bloat) while instead we could have warned inside sysfs_create_file itself, and provided a __sysfs_create_file or sysfs_create_file_nowarn, or whatever you want to call it for the handful of users that actually want to explicitely deal with failures. And it's the same for a whole bunch of those must check things. We are just adding bloat often for nothing useful. In some case, even harmful as we prevent entire modules from initializing due to what is often just a minor failure. Ben.