Re: [PATCH] pinctrl: baytrail: show output gpio state correctly on Intel Baytrail

[Linus Walleij]

On Mon, Nov 3, 2014 at 7:42 PM, Mika Westerberg
<mika.westerberg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 03, 2014 at 09:50:11AM -0600, Felipe Balbi wrote:

>> that's an issue that needs solving, but forcing every x86 kernel to ship
>> with this driver, is not a proper solution.
>
> I would rather have the driver build in to the kernel now (and btw it
> has been already in mainline quite some time so I suspect many distros
> have already enabled it), than turning it module and render some devices
> that have been working previously, fail suddenly.

We have an analogous problem with large device tree kernels for ARM
(supporting a multitude of ARM subarchitectures): a lot of statically
compiled-in drivers that just idle around after boot.

What would be nice was for the kernel to have a way of marking some
platform drivers such that if it has not been probed by init_late(),
the entire driver would be discarded, like a module that gets unloaded.

When I posed this idea in some forum it was considered "pretty hard
to achieve" (plus I guess it runs into the dilemma that we can never
discard strings) but I still think it'd be the right thing to do. It'd be very
straight-forward for driver authors to annotate their on-chip platform
drivers with some MODULE_LATE_DISCARD() or whatever.

Yours,
Linus Walleij
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