Messages in this thread | | | From | Ed Vance <> | Subject | RE: devfs + PCI serial card = no extra serial ports | Date | Fri, 14 Mar 2003 16:54:32 -0800 |
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On Fri, Mar 14, 2003 at 4:03 PM, Adam J. Richter wrote: > On Fri, 14 Mar 2003, Russell King wrote: > >On Fri, Mar 14, 2003 at 12:28:47PM -0800, Adam J. Richter wrote: > >> There was tangential mention in that thread > >> of a "/proc/serialdev" interface, but nobody really identified any > >> real benefit to it over the existing "uart: unknown" system. > > >There is one benefit, which would be to get rid of some of the yucky > >mess we currently have surrounding the implementation of stuff which > >changes the port base address/irq. > > >Currently, we have to check that we're the only user, shutdown, tweak > >stuff, hope it all goes to plan, and start stuff back up again. If > >something fails, we have to pray we can go back to the original setup > >without stuff breaking. If that fails, we mark the port "unknown". > > >All of this would be a lot simpler if we didn't have the > port actually > >open at the time we change these parameters. We could just lock the > >port against opens, check no one was using it, tweak the settings, > >and release the port. If the changes fail, just report the failure. > > When I filter out prejudicial terminology like "yucky mess", > "pray", "just", etc., I don't see a convincing explanation of how one > approach is going to result in a lower line count, fewer branches, > smaller kernel footprint, faster execution, new capabilities or any > other relevant measure that I can think of in comparison to the > existing approach. > > [ snip ]
Hi Adam,
Oh, but he _did_ give you information about such things. You filtered out the real message. Allow me to expand the macros ...
yucky mess = referenced area has an unnecessarily complex control structure. (more branches & code, slower ...)
just = fundamental simplification of the algorithm. (less code and branching needed because less to do, smaller, faster ...)
hope, pray = referenced area can generate complex errors that cannot be handled efficiently due to architectural limitations. (more local error handling code and branching, bigger, slower ...)
expert opinion != prejudicial speech. Read it again. You'll get the hang of it :-)
Cheers, Ed - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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