Re: [PATCH 0/4] ACPI scan handlers

["Rafael J. Wysocki" <rjw@sisk.pl>]

On Monday, January 28, 2013 01:54:30 PM Yinghai Lu wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 28, 2013 at 4:58 AM, Rafael J. Wysocki <rjw@sisk.pl> wrote:
> > On Thursday, January 24, 2013 01:26:56 AM Rafael J. Wysocki wrote:
> >> Hi All,
> >>
> >> There is a considerable amount of confusion in the ACPI subsystem about what
> >> ACPI drivers are used for.  Namely, some of them are used as "normal" device
> >> drivers that bind to devices and handle them using ACPI control methods (like
> >> the fan or battery drivers), but some of them are just used for handling
> >> namespace events, such as the creation or removal of device nodes (I guess it
> >> would be fair to call that an abuse of the driver core).  These two roles are
> >> quite distinct, which is particularly visible from the confusion about the role
> >> of the .remove() callback.
> >>
> >> For the "normal" drivers this callback is simply used to handle situations in
> >> which the driver needs to be unbound from the device, because one of them
> >> (either the device or the driver) is going away.  That operation can't really
> >> fail, it just needs to do the necessary cleanup.
> >>
> >> However, for the namespace events handling "drivers" .remove() means that not
> >> only the device node in question, but generally also the whole subtree below it
> >> needs to be prepared for removal, which may involve deleting multiple device
> >> objects belonging to different bus types and so on and which very well may fail
> >> (for example, those devices may be used for such things like swap or they may be
> >> memory banks used by the kernel and it may not be safe to remove them at the
> >> moment etc.).  Moreover, for these things the removal of the "driver" doesn't
> >> really make sense, because it has to be there to handle the namespace events it
> >> is designed to handle or else things will go remarkably awry in some places.
> >>
> >> To resolve all that mess I'd like to do the following, which in part is inspired
> >> by the recent Toshi Kani's hotplug framework proposal and in part is based on
> >> some discussions I had with Bjorn and others (the code references made below are
> >> based on the current contens of linux-pm.git/linux-next).
> >>
> >> 1) Introduce a special data type for "ACPI namespace event handlers" like:
> >>
> >> struct acpi_scan_handler {
> >>       const struct acpi_device_id *ids;
> >>       struct list_head list_node;
> >>       int (*attach)(struct acpi_device *adev);
> >>       int (*untie)(struct acpi_device *adev);
> >>       int (*reclaim)(struct acpi_device *adev);
> >>       void (*detach)(struct acpi_device *adev);
> >> };
> >
> > After some reconsideration I think that the "untie" and "reclaim" things won't
> > be really useful at this level.  This means that I only need ACPI scan handlers
> > to do .attach() and .detach() and all of that becomes really simple, so I don't
> > see reason to wait with that change.
> >
> > The following patches introduce ACPI scan handlers and make some use of them.
> >
> > [1/4] Introduce struct acpi_scan_handler for configuration tasks depending on
> >       device IDs.
> >
> > [2/4] Make ACPI PCI root driver use struct acpi_scan_handler.
> >
> > [3/4] Make ACPI PCI IRQ link driver use struct acpi_scan_handler.
> >
> > [4/4] Use struct acpi_scan_handler for creating platform devices enumerated via ACPI.
> 
> Good, esp you move away hard code in scan.c for platform devices.
> 
> Test with pci root bus hotplug, and it works well.
> 
> So for all 4,
> 
> Acked-by: Yinghai Lu <yinghai@kernel.org>

Thanks for the review!

> It will have some merging conflicts change in drivers/acpi/internel.h
> in pci/next for pci root bus hotplug support.
> But it should be very simple to solve it.

Yes, it shouldn't be too difficult to resolve them.

Thanks,
Rafael


-- 
I speak only for myself.
Rafael J. Wysocki, Intel Open Source Technology Center.