From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S935121AbXGSBlc (ORCPT ); Wed, 18 Jul 2007 21:41:32 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1753188AbXGSBlY (ORCPT ); Wed, 18 Jul 2007 21:41:24 -0400 Received: from smtp2.linux-foundation.org ([207.189.120.14]:44491 "EHLO smtp2.linux-foundation.org" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1752849AbXGSBlX (ORCPT ); Wed, 18 Jul 2007 21:41:23 -0400 Date: Wed, 18 Jul 2007 18:41:01 -0700 From: Andrew Morton To: Benjamin Herrenschmidt Cc: Jeff Garzik , Andi Kleen , Linus Torvalds , LKML , adaplas@gmail.com, linux-fbdev-devel@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [git patches] two warning fixes Message-Id: <20070718184101.1d31db9c.akpm@linux-foundation.org> In-Reply-To: <1184807945.25235.289.camel@localhost.localdomain> References: <20070718235504.GA9601@havoc.gtf.org> <200707190159.22654.ak@suse.de> <469EAABD.4010504@garzik.org> <1184807945.25235.289.camel@localhost.localdomain> X-Mailer: Sylpheed version 2.2.7 (GTK+ 2.8.6; i686-pc-linux-gnu) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On Thu, 19 Jul 2007 11:19:05 +1000 Benjamin Herrenschmidt wrote: > In general, I share paulus point of view here that forcing us to test > all those result code from sysfs file creation functions is just a major > PITA and adds bloat all over the kernel. There are many many cases where > the "obvious" thing of erroring out is actually not good policy. In many > cases, the failure to create some random sysfs file shouldn't prevent > the driver from operating, because the consequences of doing the later > are worse than the consequences of not having that sysfs file in the > first place. The only reason why the sysfs creation would fail is a kernel bug, so the consequence of your proposal is in fact unfixed kernel bugs. Plus, of course, a driver which doesn't offer the interfaces which it is supposed to offer. Now, we can talk about making those sysfs core functions generate warnings themselves, and we can talk about generating new wrappers around them which generate warnings and which return void, then migrating code over to use those. And we can also talk about blithely ignoring these errors and not telling anyone about our bugs, but nobody should listen to such scandalous ideas.