On Mon, Feb 08, 2016 at 08:30:07PM +0100, Lukas Wunner wrote:

Hi,

On Mon, Feb 08, 2016 at 11:20:14AM -0800, Darren Hart wrote:

quoted

My only major concern is module load order dependencies. Inter-module
dependencies are frowned upon with good reason, the kernel load ordering is
non-deterministic and it's possible, for example, for dell-laptop to fail to
find the symbols exported by dell-smbios under certain conditions.

I have worked around this in the past with things like the following:

#ifdef MODULE
#ifdef CONFIG_FOO_MODULE
	if (request_module("foo"))
		return -ENODEV;
#endif
#endif

Something like the above may be necessary for dell-smbios in dell-laptop,
dell-wmi, and dell-leds now that they depend on the dell-smbios exported
functions.

Cc Greg in case there is a better way to handle this that I'm not aware of.

Deferred probing seems to be the preferred way, see e.g.:
https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri-devel/2016-January/098404.html

(In this example, apple_gmux_present() determines presence of the device
and !vga_switcheroo_handler_flags() determine non-presence of its driver.)

This will also work if the subsystem depended on is compiled in rather
than in a module.

Ah, interesting. Thanks Lukas. Sounds like we're going to be fine as is with
this particular case.

Thanks,

-- 
Darren Hart
Intel Open Source Technology Center