Re: [PATCH 3/3] rust: macros: Allow specifying multiple module aliases

[Greg KH]

On Fri, Feb 24, 2023 at 09:41:08PM +0900, Asahi Lina wrote:
> On 24/02/2023 16.38, Greg KH wrote:
> > On Fri, Feb 24, 2023 at 04:25:57PM +0900, Asahi Lina wrote:
> >> Modules can (and usually do) have multiple alias tags, in order to
> >> specify multiple possible device matches for autoloading. Allow this by
> >> changing the alias ModuleInfo field to an Option<Vec<String>>.
> > 
> > Note, manually specifying the MODULE_ALIAS is only really ever done for
> > platform drivers today (and I would argue we need to fix that up),
> > otherwise the use of MODULE_DEVICE_TABLE() should really really be used
> > instead of having to manually specify aliases.
> 
> That's the plan, I just added this before adding support for
> MODULE_DEVICE_TABLE() when I first realized that it wasn't yet in there!
> We were briefly hardcoding the bus aliases for downstream kernels
> because the depmod stuff couldn't work with the way device ID tables
> were done in Rust downstream at the time (and I only noticed the first
> time I tried to build it as a module, since I always develop with
> monolithic kernels). That's fixed now ^^
> 
> However, the issue is that right now the module macro already takes a
> single optional alias, and that doesn't make sense as an API. We could
> remove support for this entirely (if I get my Rust MODULE_DEVICE_TABLE()
> implementation in, there will be zero users of the alias argument as far
> as I know), or add support for multiple aliases. But I think just
> leaving it as a single alias doesn't really make sense? It doesn't
> represent the way module aliases work, which is 0..N.
> 
> I'm fine with removing it if people prefer that, I just thought that for
> something as basic as module metadata we might as well do it properly
> even if there are no users right now, since it's already half in there...

How about just removing it so that people don't think it is something
that they really should be doing and adding real MODULE_DEVICE_TABLE()
support instead?

Although the first filesystem that gets written will need the
MODULE_ALIAS() logic added back, oh well.

Anyway, no objection for me for this for now, just trying to point out
that drivers really should not be using MODULE_ALIAS() at all.

thanks,

greg k-h