Re: [PATCH, RAW] IRQ: Maintain irq number globally rather than passing to IRQ handlers

Linus Torvalds
2006-10-06T15:48:48Z

On Fri, 6 Oct 2006, Jeff Garzik wrote:
>
> Here is the raw, un-split-up first pass of the irq argument removal patch
> (500K): http://gtf.org/garzik/misc/patch.irq-remove

So I'm not at all as sure about this as about the "regs" stuff.

The "regs" value has always been controversial. It's pretty much always
existed (due to the keyboard hander and the magic debugging keysequences),
and anybody who looks at 0.01 will quickly realize that the keyboard
driver was one of the very first drivers (I think it's even written in
assembly at that point: originally _all_ of what was to become Linux was
pure asm, the whole "oh, cool, I could write this part in C" came later).
But it's been pretty much a special case since day #1, purely for that
"press a key to see where the h*ck we hung" case.

In contrast, the irq argument itself is really no different from the
cookie we pass in on registration - it's just passing it back to the
driver that requested the thing. So unlike "regs", there's not really
anything strange about it, and there's nothing really "wrong" with having
it there.

So I'm not at all as convinced about this one.