On Sun, Oct 25, 2015 at 02:54:39PM +0100, Rafael J. Wysocki wrote:

On Sun, Oct 25, 2015 at 12:06 AM, Mark Brown [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

There's also the understanding people had that the order things get
bound changes the ordering for some of the other cases (perhaps it's a
good idea to do that, it seems likely to be sensible?).

But it really doesn't do that.  Also making it do so doesn't help much
in the cases where things can happen asynchronously (system
suspend/resume, runtime PM).

Yeah, people seem to have that impression though. :(

If, instead, there was a way to specify a functional dependency at the
device registration time, it might be used to change the order of
everything relevant, including probe.  That should help to reduce the
noise you're referring to.

This links back to the idea of having generic support for pre-probe
actions which is also generally useful (the ability to do things like
power on regulators for devices on enumerable buses so they can be
enumerated as standard).