From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1756600AbYLOXPW (ORCPT ); Mon, 15 Dec 2008 18:15:22 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1752886AbYLOXPJ (ORCPT ); Mon, 15 Dec 2008 18:15:09 -0500 Received: from aeryn.fluff.org.uk ([87.194.8.8]:55989 "EHLO kira.home.fluff.org" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-FAIL) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1752673AbYLOXPI (ORCPT ); Mon, 15 Dec 2008 18:15:08 -0500 Date: Mon, 15 Dec 2008 23:15:02 +0000 From: Ben Dooks To: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: driver probe error reporting Message-ID: <20081215231502.GC12431@fluff.org.uk> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline X-Disclaimer: These are my own opinions, so there! User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.18 (2008-05-17) Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org This runs on from the discussion in [1] on how drivers (especially one using a variant of the device driver framework) report errors on probe. There are two main classes of errors, the type which happen at probe time (device not responding, not enough memory, etc) and errors that are due to configuration such as missing device configuration data. It has been suggested that using dev_err() to report any configuration data error is a bloat of code as a properly debugged kernel should never find itself in this state. Unfortunatley the only diagnostic dev_xxx() macro is dev_dbg() which is only available if the the driver code itself defines DEBUG. I would think it would be better to have a macro that can be turned on/off by a kernel configuration for when debugging which turns on the messages that are important to developers creating new machine/arch support but disabled for shipping kernels. Basically, what are people's thoughts on a "Verbose probe error" configuration option in the "Kernel hacking" submenu with its own dev_probe_err() or similar macro? [1] http://groups.google.com/group/fa.linux.kernel/browse_thread/thread/ce6260537381dd94/7ed3f699db907357?show_docid=7ed3f699db907357 -- Ben (ben@fluff.org, http://www.fluff.org/) 'a smiley only costs 4 bytes'