[RFC PATCH v3] drivercore: Add driver probe deferral mechanism

[broonie@opensource.wolfsonmicro.com (Mark Brown)]

On Thu, Sep 22, 2011 at 12:51:23PM -0600, Grant Likely wrote:
> Allow drivers to report at probe time that they cannot get all the resources
> required by the device, and should be retried at a later time.

> This should completely solve the problem of getting devices
> initialized in the right order.  Right now this is mostly handled by
> mucking about with initcall ordering which is a complete hack, and
> doesn't even remotely handle the case where device drivers are in
> modules.  This approach completely sidesteps the issues by allowing
> driver registration to occur in any order, and any driver can request
> to be retried after a few more other drivers get probed.

So, one issue I did think of the other day while putting some support in
the regulator core for using this: what happens with devices which can
optionally use a resource but don't rely on it?  One example here is
that a lot of the MMC drivers have an optional regulator to control some
of the supplies for the cards.  If the reglator isn't there it won't be
used but it's not a blocker for anything.  Devices doing this would need
some way to figure out if they should -EBUSY or fail otherwise.