Re: [PATCH 03/10] mfd / platform: cros_ec: Miscellaneous character device to talk with the EC

[Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>]

On Wed, Jun 05, 2019 at 09:40:02AM +0100, Lee Jones wrote:
> On Wed, 05 Jun 2019, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
> 
> > On Wed, Jun 05, 2019 at 07:48:39AM +0100, Lee Jones wrote:
> > > On Tue, 04 Jun 2019, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
> > > > On Tue, Jun 04, 2019 at 11:39:21AM -0700, Guenter Roeck wrote:
> > > > > On Tue, Jun 4, 2019 at 11:35 AM Greg Kroah-Hartman
> > > > > <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
> > > > > >
> > > > > > On Tue, Jun 04, 2019 at 01:58:38PM -0300, Ezequiel Garcia wrote:
> > > > > > > Hey Greg,
> > > > > > >
> > > > > > > > > + dev_info(&pdev->dev, "Created misc device /dev/%s\n",
> > > > > > > > > +          data->misc.name);
> > > > > > > >
> > > > > > > > No need to be noisy, if all goes well, your code should be quiet.
> > > > > > > >
> > > > > > >
> > > > > > > I sometimes wonder about this being noise or not, so I will slightly
> > > > > > > hijack this thread for this discussion.
> > > > > > >
> > > > > > > >From a kernel developer point-of-view, or even from a platform
> > > > > > > developer or user with a debugging hat point-of-view, having
> > > > > > > a "device created" or "device registered" message is often very useful.
> > > > > >
> > > > > > For you, yes.  For someone with 30000 devices attached to their system,
> > > > > > it is not, and causes booting to take longer than it should be.
> > > 
> > > Who has 30,000 devices attached to their systems?
> > 
> > More than you might imagine.
> > 
> > > I would argue that
> > > in these special corner-cases, they should knock the log-level *down*
> > > a notch.  For the rest of us who run normal platforms, an extra second
> > > of boot time renders a more forthcoming/useful system than if each of
> > > our devices initialised silently.
> > > 
> > > Personally I like to know what devices I have on my system, and the
> > > kernel log is the first place I look.  As far as I'm concerned, for
> > > the most part, if it's not in the kernel log, I don't have it.
> > 
> > Then you "do not have" lots of devices, as we have been removing these
> > messages for a number of years now :)
> > 
> > >  "Oh wow, I didn't know I had XXX functionality on this platform."
> > > 
> > > In my real job, I am currently enabling some newly released AArch64
> > > based laptops for booting with ACPI.  I must have wasted a day whilst
> > > enabling some of the devices the system relies upon, just to find
> > > out that 90% of them were actually probing semi-fine (at least probe()
> > > was succeeding), just silently. *grumble*
> > 
> > Yup, that's normal.  If you want to see what devices are in the system,
> > look in /sys/devices/ as that is what it is for, not the kernel log.
> 
> My guess is that less than 1% of Linux users use /sys/devices in this
> way.  It's a very unfriendly interface.  Besides, when enabling a new
> platform, access to sysfs comes too far down the line to be useful in
> the majority of cases.

`lshw` is your friend :)