Re: [PATCH] Silence 'ignoring return value' warnings in drivers/video/aty/radeon_base.c

[Harvey Harrison <harvey.harrison@gmail.com>]

On Fri, 2008-05-09 at 09:50 +1000, Paul Mackerras wrote:
> Greg KH writes:
> 
> > > I hear you :) I found it useful, but it seems we should get rid of it
> > > for _create_file() now.
> > 
> > Why?  You point out it found some real bugs, should we just assume that
> > no new bugs of this same problem will happen again in the future?
> 
> Because it causes warnings for the callers which don't really care
> whether the file gets created or not, and getting rid of those
> warnings adds unnecessary bloat.
> 
> I think the best solution is to make a new sysfs_maybe_create_file()
> which isn't marked must_check, and then move suitable callers (such as
> radeonfb) over to that.  That will make it obvious in the callers that
> the file creation isn't guaranteed.

Or just a a flag parameter to the existing one that says whether failure
is allowed or not.  In a case that fails, a WARN_ON can be printed from
the common create_file rather than putting printks all over the kernel.

This would also document which files are necessary vs. optional.

Harvey