On Mon, 2016-04-11 at 09:23 -0700, Daniel Leung wrote:

On Mon, Apr 11, 2016 at 09:37:25AM +0200, Tomasz Bursztyka wrote:

Hi Daniel,

And that reminds me, that most of our drivers do not set driver API to

NULL if they fail.
But they do return an explicit code which no one care about:
see _sys_device_do_config_level() in kernel/nanokernel/device.c

I think there you can add also a tiny test:

if (device->init(info) < 0) {
info->driver_api = NULL;
}

Good point Tomasz. Might need to be part of the RFC patch that Daniel posted.

The original discussion was actually started about getting rid of returns of
initialization functions.

Ok I missed that discussion.

You can follow the link and go to the top message. The idea was first proposed by
Benjamin Walsh to get rid of return values. This RFC was just a tiny part of that.

The idea was that the kernel could not really do
anything when a driver failed initialization, so why not getting rid of returns
to save a few bytes. The burden of determining whether it is a critical error
during init is up to the driver. If there is a critical error, the driver
should assert (and setting driver_api to NULL).

There are situations where there are non-critical erros during initialization.
For example, the I2C driver, failure to set default configuration is not
critical. As long as the developer sets it later, the driver can still function.
However, with the above code, this non-critical error will cause driver_api
to be NULL, which prevents its usage at all. The driver writer should know
whether an error prevents the device from functioning at all. So it should be
up to driver writer to set driver_api to NULL. One can argue that a non-critical
error should not return anything other than 0. But then it is not passing on
the information that there is a non-critical error (though the kernel does not

Not sure how the method in the RFC differentiates between critical and
non-critical errors. Isn't the driver also *not* passing on the
non-critical error status to the app by not setting device_api = NULL in
those cases? Then how will the app know that it needs to do something to
correct such non-critical errors?

If this is merely a way to indicate that the driver is in an unusable
error state, then how is it different from critical error? - which is
not expected to happen in production releases.

really care).

Your RFC patch was not clear about that. It would require to change the
init function signature
and all the existing drivers in one go as well.
I hope we don't consider Kernel device API (init and stuff) as part of
"API 1.0".

The init change will be in another RFC. I am testing locally to see how much
space we can actually save. If it is minimal or non-existent, there is no need
to do that.

AFAIK, the device init interface is not API from my understanding. Application
should not be using these in their code. They are internal to the kernel and
drivers.


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Daniel Leung