Hi Ramesh,

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.

The idea is to let the driver decide whether it is still functioning or not.
Unusable state is a critical error to me.
A non critical error, means it is still ok to work, thus the driver API
will be set.
If the driver stops at non-critical error and do not set the API, it's
not really a non-critical error then.
(or it's a bug)

I don't see much trouble with that. Up to drivers to decide

And anyway, in 99.9% of the drivers: there will be critical errors only
I guess (unable to get
a device binding, to configure some register...).

Tomasz