Re: [PATCH] mtd: parser: cmdline: Support MTD names containing one or more colons

[Sven Eckelmann]

On Friday, 27 November 2020 18:16:54 CET ron minnich wrote:
> What none of the people involved in the original patch knew was that
> there would be other ':' in use. Sorry!
> 
> But you are right, my idea is a complete non-starter, don't know what
> I was thinking.

I am still not sure because I still didn't get what you actually wanted to 
change. I first thought that you wanted to change

    mtdparts=spi0.0:256k(0:SBL1)

to

    mtdparts=spi0.0!256k(0:SBL1)

which wouldn't work for me when ":" is not supported anymore. And it would 
break a lot of already working installations.

But maybe I completely misread it. Maybe you wanted to introduce an 
optional(!!!) stop marker like !

    mtdparts=spi0.0!:256k(0:SBL1)

to inform the parser that it doesn't have to search for : before the !. While 
this could work for me, I am not qualified enough to say which character is 
not yet used and can be utilized.

But the note about [ and ] at least makes sense to me (if it is optional):

    mtdparts=[spi0.0]:256k(0:SBL1)

But I am not sure if this will be a problem for people which already adopted 
PCI IDs inside the mtdparts without [ and ].
 
> So it seems your patch, if it works, is the way to go?

At least this is a workaround [1] which can be pushed to all the stable 
kernels which broke with the "Support MTD names containing one or more colons" 
patch. And the one which OpenWrt adopted now to get the devices booting again. 
It is only waiting for a Tested-by from you.

> I can't think
> of anything better that lets us preserve current behavior and support
> PCI device specifiers?

I am not that deep in this topic. So I am not sure what else could be done.

Kind regards,
	Sven

[1] https://patchwork.ozlabs.org/project/linux-mtd/patch/20201124062506.185392-1-sven@xxxxxxxxxxxxx/

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