Re: [RFC v1] tree-wide: remove "select FW_LOADER" uses

Luis R. Rodriguez
2015-05-22T17:43:34Z

On Fri, May 22, 2015 at 1:44 AM, Takashi Iwai <tiwai@suse.de> wrote:
> At Fri, 22 May 2015 10:17:48 +0200,
> Paul Bolle wrote:
>>
>> On Fri, 2015-05-22 at 09:11 +0200, Geert Uytterhoeven wrote:
>> > On Fri, May 22, 2015 at 8:53 AM, Borislav Petkov <bp@alien8.de> wrote:
>> > > One thing I forgot last night: what about randconfigs? All that
>> > > functionality which selects FW_LOADER, won't boot anymore, right? I
>> > > mean, there are provisions to build fine even with FW_LOADER unset but
>> > > if you want to boot-test those kernels, you will artificially fail due
>> > > to missing request_firmware* things...
>>
>> Luis also tried to explain to me that disabling FW_LOADER shouldn't make
>> the build fail. (And, of course, we could decide to not care about
>> randconfig builds that have EXPERT set. Maybe we could even special case
>> EXPERT in randconfig. But that would make randconfig builds less useful.
>> That's a separate issue, anyhow.)
>
> But FW_LOADER is a tristate, so it might be inconsistent if selected
> randomly? Luis' patch doesn't add depends but just removes select.

We could go both ways, either remove the "select" or replace it with
"depends on". As you note keeping the "depends on" ensures run time
sanity for the possible tristate mismatches, but this is an EXPERT
concern. The crux of what option to go with is:

Should we concern ourselves with run time configuration issues when
folks enable EXPERT?

Without EXPERT all run time configurations are vetted to run as
FW_LOADER defaults to y. If we go down the path of removing the select
completely we'd be taking a position that we could at least ensure
EXPERT builds will work, but we cannot vet for not run time sanity of
such build. I favor simplicity so would prefer to nuke the select
completely and if we're really concerned about EXPERT users tristate
mismatch misconfiguration why not just replace tristate with bool for
FW_LOADER. That would do us the service of simplifying that code a
bit, and leave only in place one way for folks that enable EXPERT to
shoot themselves in the foot with FW_LOADER?

Luis