Re: 8250.nr_uarts broken in 3.7

Jiri Slaby
2013-03-08T22:47:10Z

On 03/08/2013 10:27 PM, Josh Boyer wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 08, 2013 at 09:39:23AM +0800, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
>>>>> Yes, reverting just 835d844d1 on top of 3.7.0 fixes it. I also see why
>>>>> now. That commit changed the module name from 8250 to 8250_core in the
>>>>> makefile, so clearly 8250.nr_uarts = 16 isn't going to get parsed.
>>>>> Adding 8250_core.nr_uarts = 16 seems to work fine. This wasn't
>>>>> immediately obvious because the whole thing is built-in and not a
>>>>> module. Thankfully, looking in /sys/modules/ still works and that
>>>>> showed up pretty clearly.
>>>>>
>>>>> So I guess this isn't really a break in functionality as much as it's a
>>>>> driver rename. Not sure if it's worth fixing in some form or not.
>>>>
>>>> Yes it needs to be fixed, we shouldn't break userspace stuff like that.
>>>> Patches gladly accepted.
>>>
>>> OK... well I don't think renaming it back to 8250 is going to actually
>>> work. It's already been renamed for 2 releases now, and a renaming
>>> isn't appropriate for 3.8.y.
>>>
>>> I don't remember exactly, but I don't think simply adding a modalias to
>>> 8250 will work either.
>>>
>>> So basically, the only way to fix this that I can see is to create a
>>> new, additional module parameter or something similar that parses
>>> "8250.nr_uarts". Is that what you had in mind?
>>
>> I think that's the only way we can properly solve this, so yes, that
>> would be good.
>
> "Be good" is subjective. The following is functional, but it's pretty
> damn ugly. Hopefully I'm missing some cleaner way to do this, but in my
> few attempts I didn't find anything. I really hope I'm just blind or
> wrong or something.
>
> I think the lesson here is "don't rename modules".
>
> josh
>
> From: Josh Boyer <jwboyer@redhat.com>
> Date: Fri, 8 Mar 2013 16:18:24 -0500
> Subject: [PATCH] serial: 8250: Keep 8250.nr_uarts option functional
>
> With commit 835d844d1 (8250_pnp: do pnp probe before legacy probe), the
> 8250 driver was renamed to 8250_core. This means any existing usage of
> 8250.nr_uarts= as module parameter or as a kernel command line switch is
> now broken, as the 8250_core driver doesn't parse options belonging to
> something called "8250".
>
> We need the option to still be called "nr_uarts" and the existing module
> parameter macros do excellent checking to make sure you don't wind up with
> duplicate parameter names, so we can't just call __module_param_call with
> a different prefix. Thus, we open code the kernel_param struct to add a
> "8250.nr_uarts" parameter to the module.
>
> Signed-off-by: Josh Boyer <jwboyer@redhat.com>
> ---
> drivers/tty/serial/8250/8250.c | 10 ++++++++++
> 1 file changed, 10 insertions(+)
>
> diff --git a/drivers/tty/serial/8250/8250.c b/drivers/tty/serial/8250/8250.c
> index 0efc815..e378e7e 100644
> --- a/drivers/tty/serial/8250/8250.c
> +++ b/drivers/tty/serial/8250/8250.c
> @@ -3388,6 +3388,16 @@ MODULE_PARM_DESC(share_irqs, "Share IRQs with other non-8250/16x50 devices"
> module_param(nr_uarts, uint, 0644);
> MODULE_PARM_DESC(nr_uarts, "Maximum number of UARTs supported. (1-" __MODULE_STRING(CONFIG_SERIAL_8250_NR_UARTS) ")");
>
> +/* This module was renamed to 8250_core in 3.7. Keep the old "8250" name
> + * working as well for nr_uarts so we don't break people. We open code the
> + * addition of the parameter because we need to actually keep the name
> + * identical and the convenient macros will happily refuse to let us do that
> + * by failing the build with redefinition errors. I'm really sorry.
> + */
> +static struct kernel_param __moduleparam_const __param_8250_nr_uarts
> +__used __attribute__ ((unused,__section__ ("__param"),aligned(sizeof(void *))))
> += { "8250.nr_uarts", &param_ops_uint, 0644, -1, { &nr_uarts } };
> +

Yeah, I agree this is ugly. Just re-definining MODULE_PARAM_PREFIX at
the end of the file should do the trick (followed by
"module_param(nr_uarts, uint, 0644)").

> module_param(skip_txen_test, uint, 0644);
> MODULE_PARM_DESC(skip_txen_test, "Skip checking for the TXEN bug at init time");

Well, we should do that for all the parameters, right? Sigh.

thanks,
--
js
suse labs