Re: [PATCH 1/2] request_firmware without a device

[Marcel Holtmann <marcel@holtmann.org>]

Hi Greg,

> > The patch allows calling request_firmware without a 'struct device'.
> > It appears we just need a name here from 'struct device'. I changed it
> > to use a kobject as Patrick suggested.
> > Next patch will use the new API to request firmware (microcode) for a CPU.
> 
> But a cpu does have a struct device.  Why not just use that?
> 
> > +fw_setup_class_device_id(struct class_device *class_dev, struct kobject *kobj)
> >  {
> >  	/* XXX warning we should watch out for name collisions */
> > -	strlcpy(class_dev->class_id, dev->bus_id, BUS_ID_SIZE);
> > +	strlcpy(class_dev->class_id, kobj->k_name, BUS_ID_SIZE);
> 
> There's a function for this, kobject_name(), please never touch k_name
> directly.
> 
> > +EXPORT_SYMBOL(request_firmware_kobj);
> 
> Ick, if you really want to do this, just fix up all callers of
> request_firmware(), there aren't that many of them.
> 
> But I don't recommend it anyway.

I also disagree with this change at all. The callers of request_firmware
should not fiddle around with kobject's to make this work. All of them
have their struct device and they should use it.

So I would propose that we fix the caller and the not request_firmware
code. However one option would be calling it with NULL as device
argument and it registers itself a dummy device for the operation.

Regards

Marcel