Re: Race free attributes in sysfs

From: Kristian HÃgsberg
Date: Tue May 22 2007 - 11:58:36 EST


On 5/22/07, Pierre Ossman <drzeus-list@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Kay Sievers wrote:
> We could change the driver-core to suppress the creation of an attribute
> if the attribute's show() or store() method returns something like
> -ENOENT at registration time?
> The driver would pass _all_ possible attributes of the device at
> registration time, but the core would only create the attributes which
> are implemented for this particular device? Would that work for you?
>

Not sure. Not in an obvious way at least.

It also doesn't feel like "the kernel way". Generally you can
create/allocate an object, assign attributes to it, then activate it.
Couldn't it be done so that I can add sysfs stuff to a device after I
just initialized it? (but before I add it).

I agree here - if it was just possible to do this between create and
add, this discussion would be moot.

> You can assign any number of attribute groups to the device. If they
> don't have a group name, they will all be created directly at the device
> level. Would that work for you?

I've had a look at sysfs groups and the biggest beef I have with those
is that they're too low level. In order to use them I first need to
create device attributes, then create an array of pointers to each attr
member. It would be nice if I could just feed an array of device
attributes (i.e. I want wrappers).

I did a little helper struct for the firewire subsystem that might be
useful on a more general level. It's struct fw_attribute_group in
drivers/firewire/fw-device.h and the implementation is
init_fw_attribute_group in drivers/firewire/fw-device.c. But I agree,
attribute groups require a fair bit of boiler plate code.

cheers,
Kristian
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