On Thu, 19 Jul 2007 11:19:05 +1000
Benjamin Herrenschmidt [off-list ref] wrote:

In general, I share paulus point of view here that forcing us to test
all those result code from sysfs file creation functions is just a major
PITA and adds bloat all over the kernel. There are many many cases where
the "obvious" thing of erroring out is actually not good policy. In many
cases, the failure to create some random sysfs file shouldn't prevent
the driver from operating, because the consequences of doing the later
are worse than the consequences of not having that sysfs file in the
first place. 

The only reason why the sysfs creation would fail is a kernel bug,
so the consequence of your proposal is in fact unfixed kernel bugs.

Plus, of course, a driver which doesn't offer the interfaces which
it is supposed to offer.

Now, we can talk about making those sysfs core functions generate warnings
themselves, and we can talk about generating new wrappers around them which
generate warnings and which return void, then migrating code over to use
those.

And we can also talk about blithely ignoring these errors and not telling
anyone about our bugs, but nobody should listen to such scandalous ideas.

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