Re: [PATCH] net: usb: lan78xx: add weak dependency with micrel phy module

Jose Ignacio Tornos Martinez
2024-07-29T08:34:41Z

Hello Dragan,

> Quite frankly, all this makes me wonder why weakdeps were merged into
> the mainline kernel [1] with no real consumers? Perhaps this is good
> time for Jose and Luis to chime in.
Well, I requested this commenting as an example the case of lan78xx and
the possible phy modules, becasue it is clearly failing when initramfs
is generated due to the dynamic phy module loading process.
In my opinion this example was enough good because I found it difficult get
an automatic way to get this information in advance for all the cases and
becasue I need to fix this initramfs issue.

But with a first glance, I also found several examples (not phy related),
in which it seems the suitable softdep was added to solve the initramfs
missing module issue:
80f4e62730a9 drm/panfrost: Mark simple_ondemand governor as softdep
0c94f58cef31 drm/lima: Mark simple_ondemand governor as softdep
2ebe16155dc8 scsi: ufs: core: Add soft dependency on governor_simpleondemand
dfe085d8dcd0 crypto: xts - Add softdep on ecb
...

Therefore, I requested to provide this kind of new dependency (weakdep)
first in general, becasue I thought it could be useful for a lot of cases
not only for the unkown (for initramfs) phy modules (i.e. lan78xx).
That is, in spite of the initial usage has been rejected, I think it can
still be considered by the other commented examples (or new ones).
I would like to confirm some example(s) to have some usage, but this will
need to be from September after my holidays.

Thanks

Best regards
José Ignacio