Hi Martyn,
Do you have any further comments on this patch?
I quote below the commit message, inlining some comments since
some messages didn't hit some of the recipients the first time.
On Mon, Oct 25, 2010 at 21:11:13 -0400, Emilio G. Cota wrote:
> From: Emilio G. Cota <[email protected]>
>
> The way in which VME devices and drivers are currently bound together
> involves unnecessary contortions. Controlling a device with a VME driver
> requires the following steps, in this order:
(snip)
> There are a few things I dislike about the above:
> * installing drivers even before the bridges they need are present
> seems counter-intuitive and wrong.
My mistake, this isn't true. As we've discussed already(*), binding
happens both when a device is registered AND when a driver is registered.
(*) http://lkml.org/lkml/2010/10/27/284
> * a VME bus may need more than 32 devices--the relation to the 32 slots on
> a VME crate is artificial and confusing:
(snip)
Which translates into what I described here:
http://lkml.org/lkml/2010/10/27/284
And I resuscitate from that message the following:
> Imagine the following situation:
>
> - insmod vme_driver1.ko bus=0,0,0 slot=1,2,3
>
> Then two days after I want to install another driver:
>
> - insmod vme_driver2.ko bus=0,0,0 slot=X,Y,Z
>
> Now X,Y,Z cannot be in (1,2,3), because those are understood
> as physical slots, even if they're not (this is not VME64x)
>
> So, anytime I need to install a device, I must know the slot
> numbers of all other devices--even though there's no
> physical meaning to it!
In the model I proposed device id's ("slots") are unique
to each driver. This way we can install drivers without
caring whether or not other drivers have overlapping "slot" id's
for their devices.
> * .probe and .remove pass a pointer to a struct device representing a VME
> bridge, instead of representing the device to be added/removed.
> * a bridge's module may be removed anytime and things do fall over;
> there is no refcounting at all and thus all drivers attached to
> the removed bus will oops.
As discussed here no one is happy with the current state of affairs:
http://lkml.org/lkml/2010/10/27/264
Greg suggests that when a bridge is removed, all devices on top of it
should go away. In my opinion that's the most convenient solution.
This patch, however, does not allow a bridge to be removed unless all
its devices are removed first. It's not as nice as what Greg proposes,
but at least it's an improvement over what we've got now--it gets
refcounting right, etc.
After having inspected the USB core code I think it wouldn't be hard
to go from this patch to a situation where a bridge can be removed
anytime without the whole thing falling over. Before tackling that
I'd like to hear your opinion.
Thanks,
Emilio