Re: [PATCH 00/12] i2c: add and start using i2c_adapter-specific printk helpers

[Johan Hovold <johan@kernel.org>]

On Tue, Dec 23, 2025 at 11:02:22AM +0100, Bartosz Golaszewski wrote:
> It's been another year of discussing the object life-time problems at
> conferences. I2C is one of the offenders and its problems are more
> complex than those of some other subsystems. It seems the revocable[1]
> API may make its way into the kernel this year but even with it in
> place, I2C won't be able to use it as there's currently nothing to
> *revoke*. The struct device is embedded within the i2c_adapter struct
> whose lifetime is tied to the provider device being bound to its driver.
> 
> Fixing this won't be fast and easy but nothing's going to happen if we
> don't start chipping away at it. The ultimate goal in order to be able
> to use an SRCU-based solution (revocable or otherwise) is to convert the
> embedded struct device in struct i2c_adapter into an __rcu pointer that
> can be *revoked*. To that end we need to hide all dereferences of
> adap->dev in drivers.

No, this is not the way to do it. You start with designing and showing
what the end result will look like *before* you start rewriting world
like you are doing here.

We should not be making driver code less readable just to address some
really niche corner cases like hot pluggable i2c controllers.

But in any case, don't get ahead of things by posting changes that we
most likely don't want in the end anyway.

> This series addresses the usage of adap->dev in device printk() helpers
> (dev_err() et al). It introduces a set of i2c-specific helpers and
> starts using them across bus drivers. For now just 12 patches but I'll
> keep on doing it if these get accepted. Once these get upstream for
> v6.20/7.0, we'll be able to also start converting i2c drivers outside of
> drivers/i2c/.

Same comment applies to the other two series you posted today.

Johan