Re: [PATCH] i8k: Add support for temperature sensor labels

[Jean Delvare <jdelvare@suse.de>]

Hi Pali, hi Greg,

Le Saturday 29 November 2014 à 19:04 +0100, Pali Rohár a écrit :
> On Saturday 29 November 2014 18:51:52 Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
> > On Sat, Nov 29, 2014 at 06:49:43PM +0100, Pali Rohár wrote:
> > > On Saturday 29 November 2014 18:43:15 Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
> > > > No Documentation/ABI/ entry for your new sysfs file?
> > > 
> > > It is standard hwmon sysfs entry which is used by other
> > > hwmon drivers... It is not i8k.ko driver specific.
> > 
> > Ok, then why is this driver not in a "hwmon-standard" location
> > in the kernel tree?
> > 
> > greg k-h
> 
> This is question not for me but for maintainers of hwmon and char 
> trees... I just contributed patch for existing driver.
> 
> But my idea is that because this driver exported temperature data 
> for a long time only via /proc/i8k character file (since 2.4? or 
> earlier?) and only 3 years ago was added standard hwmon interface 
> to existing code (949a9d70020defd7c241607ab3ed037ea88f551c).
> 
> So now there are both interfaces. Standard hwmon and old /proc/.
> 
> CCing Jean Delvare (author of hwmon i8k code)

Yes, that's for historical reasons. Also the i8k driver does more than
just hardware monitoring, it handles function keys and power status too.
And it is heavily platform-specific. So while I agree that drivers/char
isn't necessarily the best place for this driver, I'd rather move it to
drivers/platform/x86 together with other laptop vendor-specific drivers,
than to drivers/hwmon.

Ultimately /proc/i8k should be killed altogether and every function
should use the appropriate standard interface. But I don't have any Dell
laptop around so I won't go into that myself.

-- 
Jean Delvare
SUSE L3 Support