Hi Geert,
On Wed, Oct 10, 2018 at 09:04:08PM +0200, Geert Uytterhoeven wrote:
Hi Dmitry,
On Wed, Oct 10, 2018 at 7:03 PM Dmitry Torokhov dmitry.torokhov@gmail.com wrote:
Same goes for patches that deal with error handling in probe() functions that your AUTOSEL scripts like to pick. Yes, they are fixing bugs. But show me actually users affected by them? You encounter these issues with probe when you do initial device bringup, but once device is stabilized probes are expected to succeed. There won't be duplicate sysfs attributes, memory will be allocated, and so on. Fixes to remove() might be worthwhile if it is a hot-pluggable bus, but otherwise - no. Yes, the box may OOPS if someone manually unbind device through sysfs, but the solution is no to patch stable kernels, but simply tell user "dont to that [yet]".
In modern days with -EPROBE_DEFER, bugs in probe() are much more likely to cause damage than before.
Yes, as usual, the real life is not quite as black-and-white as I painted it to be ;)
If the patch handles failures that could be result of signalling deferral I would consider it for stable. OTOH it is not very likely that older, previously working device, will start signalling deferral where it did not before, so if we see deferral it is likely we are dealing with newer platform, and it is unclear how far stable backport should go in this case. So again, choices, choices ;)
Thanks.