Re: [RFC] (almost) booting allyesconfig -- please don't poke super-io without request_region

On Fri, 11 Jul 2008 09:27:26 +0200, Hans de Goede wrote:

Jean Delvare wrote:

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Hi Hans, hi Milton,

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One could make a superio driver, and create sub-devices for the IR, 
I2C, floppy, parallel, etc
nodes.

There have been proposals to do this, and this would indeed be a very
good idea, but unfortunately nobody took the time to implement this
properly, push it upstream and volunteer to maintain it. The problem is
that you don't need just a "driver", but a new subsystem, that needs to
be designed and maintained.

Well, I believe there have been some lightweight superio locking coordinator 
patches been floating around on the lm_sensors list, and I have reviewed them 
and then a new version was done with my issues fixed.

I kinda liked the proposed solution there, it was quite simple, moved all the 
generic superio stuff into generic superio code, and added locking for super io 
access from multiple drivers, what ever happened to those patches?

As far as I know, nothing, and this is the problem. Somebody needs to
step up and call him/herself the maintainer of the new code, and push
it upstream and convert all the drivers (hwmon, watchdog, parallel
port...) to make use of it. And I am not the one to do this, I am busy
enough as is with i2c and hwmon.

If were to start using those, we could actually do a request region and then 
never release it, as things should be.

Yes, if we have a superio access coordinator, it can request the region
and not release it. But as long as we don't have that, I agree with
Milton that the individual drivers should temporarily request the
Super-I/O region before accessing it.

-- 
Jean Delvare