Re: [PATCH 207/493] i2c: remove use of __devinit

[Jean Delvare <khali-PUYAD+kWke1g9hUCZPvPmw@public.gmane.org>]

On Tue, 20 Nov 2012 13:23:42 +0000, Russell King - ARM Linux wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 20, 2012 at 09:20:46AM +0100, Jean Delvare wrote:
> > Hi Bill,
> > 
> > On Mon, 19 Nov 2012 13:22:36 -0500, Bill Pemberton wrote:
> > > CONFIG_HOTPLUG is going away as an option so __devinit is no longer
> > > needed.
> > 
> > Can you please point me/us to the discussion explaining the rationale
> > behind this move, and the explanation of what will be done exactly?
> > While I can easily understand that we want to drop CONFIG_HOTPLUG and
> > always enable hot-plug support, I don't see where we are going with
> > removing __devinit annotations and the like.
> 
> It's actually very simple to understand.
> 
> 1. CONFIG_HOTPLUG is going away; it's already defined to always be 'Y'.
> 2. This means that the the devinit sections will not be discarded anymore.
> 3. As a result, there's no point the devinit sections existing anymore.
> 4. As there's no devinit sections, the __devinit marker is entirely
>    redundant and useless.

Ah, yes, very simple indeed. Not sure how I managed to not understand
it earlier today. Thanks for explaining.

> The reason this is being done is because the benefit to cost ratio of this
> is far too high; it's well proven that people constantly get these markings
> wrong, and with most kernels having had hotplug enabled anyway, it's not
> providing much in the way of space saving benefit over the number of section
> conflicts it causes.  So, it's been decided a few years ago that this is

Yes, I completely agree.

> going to happen, with that justification, and it's been accepted by 300
> odd kernel developers in at least one kernel summit when it was talked

Probably that was one I didn't attend to, as I can't remember this
discussion.

> about... and it's been mentioned on mailing lists several times.

Maybe LKML, which I don't read. So I wasn't aware of the plan before
seeing Bill's patches.

-- 
Jean Delvare