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veto CONFIG_MTD_PARTITIONS?

DISCUSSION Artem Bityutskiy 1 participant 2 messages Apr 15, 2011 – Apr 18, 2011 Memory technology devices (MTD)

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Artem Bityutskiy

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Hi,

we have a very small mtdpart driver which provides very basic mtd partitioning services. And this driver may be compiled out. This probably mattered many years ago, when saving ~7KiB (on arm arch) mattered a lot.

But this creates mess:

[dedekind@eru l2-mtd-2.6]$ grep -r CONFIG_MTD_PARTITIONS drivers/mtd/* | wc -l
132

We have really a lot of these "#ifdef CONFIG_MTD_PARTITIONS" statements, nearly in every driver. And new drivers have this.

I think it is time to declare than saving ~7KiB is not worth the mess anymore and veto CONFIG_MTD_PARTITIONS - no new "#ifdef CONFIG_MTD_PARTITIONS" should be accepted.

Someone should just make mtdpart.c to be an integral part of the MTD core and remove all those #ifdefs.

Hopefully we'll force someone to clean this up.

If no one strongly disagrees, let's veto CONFIG_MTD_PARTITIONS usage.

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Best Regards,
Artem Bityutskiy (Артём Битюцкий)
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#1 lore raw
Quoted 20 lines · Artem Bityutskiy

Hi,

we have a very small mtdpart driver which provides very basic mtd partitioning services. And this driver may be compiled out. This probably mattered many years ago, when saving ~7KiB (on arm arch) mattered a lot.

But this creates mess:

[dedekind@eru l2-mtd-2.6]$ grep -r CONFIG_MTD_PARTITIONS drivers/mtd/* | wc -l
132

We have really a lot of these "#ifdef CONFIG_MTD_PARTITIONS" statements, nearly in every driver. And new drivers have this.

I think it is time to declare than saving ~7KiB is not worth the mess anymore and veto CONFIG_MTD_PARTITIONS - no new "#ifdef CONFIG_MTD_PARTITIONS" should be accepted.

Quoted 6 lines

Someone should just make mtdpart.c to be an integral part of the MTD core and remove all those #ifdefs.

Hopefully we'll force someone to clean this up.

If no one strongly disagrees, let's veto CONFIG_MTD_PARTITIONS usage.

OK, since no one disagreed, and tglx explicitly agreed in the mtd chat, and dwmw2 kind of supported this, let's prohibit more CONFIG_MTD_PARTITIONS usage and try to force people to clean this up.

I've updated the MTD web site with this information:
http://www.linux-mtd.infradead.org/doc/general.html#L_partitions_ban

Signature · 2 lines
Best Regards,
Artem Bityutskiy (Артём Битюцкий)