Re: [PATCH] pwm-backlight: add regulator and GPIO support

[Mark Brown <broonie@opensource.wolfsonmicro.com>]

On Wed, Jul 04, 2012 at 09:26:58PM +0900, Alex Courbot wrote:
> On 07/04/2012 07:48 PM, Sascha Hauer wrote:>> +

> > This looses several resources allocated earlier, like the enable gpio
> > and the pwm. This is really bad here since I have no regulator specified
> > and devm_regulator_get returns with -EPROBE_DEFER. Next time the core
> > tries to probe the driver the driver bails out because the gpio and the
> > pwm is already requested.

> That's very bad indeed. I assumed that the kernel would free
> devm-allocated resources after probe returned -EPROBE_DEFER, so that
> probe could reallocate them the next time it is called. Apparently
> that was wrong. Do you know what would the right approach be in this
> case? Does the kernel preserve the device structure and its
> associated data between the two calls to probe? If so, I could just
> check whether the private data has already been constructed to know
> which state we are in and continue from there.

I'd really expect the devm_ functions to behave as you expect - if they
don't currently we should probably fix them so that they do otherwise
we're going to be in for a lot of surprises and probe deferral becomes a
lot more cumbersome to use.