Re: 2.6.24 breaks BIOS updates on all Dell machines

From: Jean Delvare
Date: Tue Feb 05 2008 - 15:16:56 EST


On Mon, 4 Feb 2008 22:45:47 -0800, Greg KH wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 29, 2008 at 11:15:22PM +0100, Jean Delvare wrote:
> > I'm a bit confused. It seems to me that the "class devices" are named
> > differently in recent kernels. The i2c-dev class devices were originally
> > showing as i2c-%d in their parent device directories (causing the
> > collision), and now show as i2c-dev:i2c-%d. This suggests that the
> > collision the patch above was trying to solve is in fact already fixed
> > (by prefixing the device name with the class name). The good news is
> > that it would mean that we can just revert the patch in question...
> >
> > But quite frankly I'm not really sure, the class devices look different
> > on every kernel I looked at, depending on the version and whether
> > CONFIG_SYSFS_DEPRECATED is set or not.
>
> THe naming is different depending on that sysfs variable, yes. But it
> should be consistant other than that. If not, please let me know.
>
> And yes, we did have to add the ":" a while ago to handle the namespace
> collisions we were having.

OK, I am officially confused now.

This is 2.6.24, CONFIG_SYSFS_DEPRECATED=y:

# ls -l /sys/class/i2c-adapter/i2c-0
total 0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 fév 5 18:07 device -> ../../../devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:01.0/0000:01:00.0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 fév 5 18:17 i2c-dev:i2c-0 -> ../../../class/i2c-dev/i2c-0
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 4096 fév 5 18:07 name
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 0 fév 5 18:17 power
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 fév 5 18:07 subsystem -> ../../../class/i2c-adapter
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4096 fév 5 2008 uevent

2.6.24 rebuilt without CONFIG_SYSFS_DEPRECATED:

# ls -l /sys/class/i2c-adapter/i2c-0/
total 0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 fév 5 18:42 device -> ../../../../../../devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:01.0/0000:01:00.0
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 0 fév 5 18:42 i2c-0
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 4096 fév 5 18:31 name
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 0 fév 5 18:42 power
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 fév 5 18:31 subsystem -> ../../../../../../class/i2c-adapter
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4096 fév 5 2008 uevent

The latter corresponds to what older kernels had ("i2c-0"). This means
that enabling CONFIG_SYSFS_DEPRECATED causes the i2c-dev class device
names to change. Isn't it supposed to be exactly the other way around,
i.e. enabling CONFIG_SYSFS_DEPRECATED should preserve the names as they
were in older kernels?

If the "$class:" prefix was added to prevent collisions (and this
sounds like a good idea), then why wasn't it added in the regular case
(CONFIG_SYSFS_DEPRECATED=n) as well?

Someone please clarify the situation.

Thanks,
--
Jean Delvare
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