Re: [lm-sensors] [PATCH] hwmon class driver registration with a device number

[Jonathan Cameron <jic23@cam.ac.uk>]

On 10/07/11 10:56, Himanshu Chauhan wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 06, 2011 at 11:52:37PM -0700, Greg KH wrote:
>> On Fri, Oct 07, 2011 at 12:12:40PM +0530, Himanshu Chauhan wrote:
>>> On Thu, Oct 06, 2011 at 12:07:52PM -0700, Guenter Roeck wrote:
>>>> And why, and what for.
>>>
>>> The initial idea of posting to kernelnewbies was to get a hint on how
>>> the patch would be taken as. I wanted to know if developers will like
>>> the idea behind it or not. I guess, Guenter is not convinced with
>>> any of my reasoning. I am willing to clean it up further only if
>>> I get a positive hint. But it doesn't seem to be going anywhere.
>>>
>>> Thanks Guenter, Alan, and Greg for taking your time and reviewing it.
>>>
>>> Greg: To answer your last question, if this was taken positively, I
>>> was thinking of having functionality similar to misc device registration.
>>
>> But why?  What is that device node going to be used for?  Who would be
>> using it in userspace and where would it be tied into in the kernel?
>>
> The device node, as I said earlier, can be used for doing IOCTLS. In user space,
> applications that manage and monitor system environment will need to use this
> interface for querying the sensor's location, for example. In side the kernel,
> the driver that is driving the particular hardware sensor can register a char
> interface for all this and then register with hwmon with the same major/minor
> for usual sysfs export of data.
If location is useful info why not propose a sysfs interface for it?