Re: [PATCH] CCISS: Don't print driver version until we actually find a device

From: Dmitry Torokhov
Date: Thu Jul 27 2006 - 08:59:31 EST


On 7/26/06, Jeff Garzik <jeff@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Arjan van de Ven wrote:
> On Wed, 2006-07-26 at 00:43 +0200, Jesper Juhl wrote:
>> On 26/07/06, Bjorn Helgaas <bjorn.helgaas@xxxxxx> wrote:
>>> If we don't find any devices, we shouldn't print anything.
>>>
>> I disagree.
>> I find it quite nice to be able to see that the driver loaded even if
>> it finds nothing. At least then when there's a problem, I can quickly
>> see that at least it is not because I didn't forget to load the
>> driver, it's something else. Saves time since I can start looking for
>> reasons why the driver didn't find anything without first spending
>> additional time checking if I failed to cause it to load for some
>> reason.
>
> I'll add a second reason: it is a REALLY nice property to be able to see
> which driver is started last in case of a crash/hang, so that the guilty
> party is more obvious..

OTOH, it is not a property that scales well at all.

When you build extra drivers into the kernel, or distros load drivers
you don't need (_every_ distro does this), you wind up with a bunch of
version strings for drivers for hardware you don't have.


Given that boot tracing is best done with initcall_debug and
drivers that care about their version string can report it through
/sys/modules/<driver>/version why should version string be printed at
load time at all?

--
Dmitry
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