On Mon, Oct 16, 2000 at 02:34:44AM -0400, Jeff Garzik wrote:
> Andrey Panin wrote:
> >
> > Hi all,
> >
> > after walking through some of NIC drivers and trying to remove check_region()
> > calls, i have two small questions:
> >
> > 1) many NIC drivers contain (in XXX_probe1 functions) check like this:
> >
> > if (dev == NULL) {
> > dev = init_etherdev();
> > }
> >
> > but many drivers don't check (dev == NULL) at all. So first question: is this check
> > and init_etherdev() call really required or this is old crap waiting for removal ?
>
> Look at the call paths for the drivers coming from Space.c... Most of
> the NIC drivers that do the above are ISA drivers, where they are always
> provided a device struct. I believe that we can change the above to
>
> if (dev == NULL)
> BUG ();
>
Looks like init_etherdev() calls can be safely removed or replaced by BUG()'s
(at least for ISA NIC drivers). Anybody have any objections ?
>
> > 2) if init_etherdev() is required, than call to unregister_netdevice() is
> > required too (in case of probe failure), isn't it ?
>
> I think so.. I do know that if init_etherdev() is required, you must
> also kfree() in the module_exit() function. Since this case is so rare
> (AFAICS), most drivers don't handle this case, and never call kfree at
> all.
>
> -If- init_etherdev is required at all (I think it is not), then you
> would need a flag... You would need two flags, if you want to handle
> the case where dev->priv is allocated manually, versus allocated in
> init_etherdev.
>
> if (dev == NULL) {
> dev = init_etherdev (0, 0);
> if (!dev) return -ENOMEM;
> tp->have_dynamic_netdev = 1;
> }
>
As far as I can remember, I did not see such checks in NIC drivers :(
> --
> Jeff Garzik | The difference between laziness and
> Building 1024 | prioritization is the end result.
> MandrakeSoft |
> -
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Best regards,
Andrey
--
Andrey Panin | Embedded systems software engineer
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