Re: [PATCH] mtd: parser: cmdline: Support MTD names containing one or more colons

Sven Eckelmann
2020-11-27T17:36:38Z

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On Friday, 27 November 2020 18:16:54 CET ron minnich wrote:
> What none of the people involved in the original patch knew was that
> there would be other ':' in use. Sorry!
>
> But you are right, my idea is a complete non-starter, don't know what
> I was thinking.

I am still not sure because I still didn't get what you actually wanted to
change. I first thought that you wanted to change

mtdparts=spi0.0:256k(0:SBL1)

to

mtdparts=spi0.0!256k(0:SBL1)

which wouldn't work for me when ":" is not supported anymore. And it would
break a lot of already working installations.

But maybe I completely misread it. Maybe you wanted to introduce an
optional(!!!) stop marker like !

mtdparts=spi0.0!:256k(0:SBL1)

to inform the parser that it doesn't have to search for : before the !. While
this could work for me, I am not qualified enough to say which character is
not yet used and can be utilized.

But the note about [ and ] at least makes sense to me (if it is optional):

mtdparts=[spi0.0]:256k(0:SBL1)

But I am not sure if this will be a problem for people which already adopted
PCI IDs inside the mtdparts without [ and ].

> So it seems your patch, if it works, is the way to go?

At least this is a workaround [1] which can be pushed to all the stable
kernels which broke with the "Support MTD names containing one or more colons"
patch. And the one which OpenWrt adopted now to get the devices booting again.
It is only waiting for a Tested-by from you.

> I can't think
> of anything better that lets us preserve current behavior and support
> PCI device specifiers?

I am not that deep in this topic. So I am not sure what else could be done.

Kind regards,
Sven

[1] https://patchwork.ozlabs.org/project/linux-mtd/patch/20201124062506.185392-1-sven@narfation.org/

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