On Sun, 15 Oct 2006 17:16:35 -0700
David Brownell <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> > You, the driver author _do not know_ what pci_set_mwi() does at present, on
> > all platforms, nor do you know what it does in the future.
>
> I know that it enables MWI accesses ... or fails. Beyond that, there
> should be no reason to care. If the hardware can use a lower-overhead
> type of PCI bus cycle, I want it to do so. If not, no sweat.
>
There are two reasons why it can fail:
1: The bus doesn't support MWI. Here, the caller doesn't care.
2: The bus _does_ support MWI, but the attempt to enable it failed.
Here we very much do care, because we're losing performance.
>
> > This is not a terribly important issue, and it is far from the worst case
> > of missed error-checking which we have in there.
>
> The reason I think it's important enough to continue this discussion is
> that as it currently stands, it's a good example of a **BAD** interface
> design ... since it's pointlessly marked as must_check. (See appended
> patch to fix that issue.)
It's important to continue this discussion so that certain principles can
be set and agreed to. Because we have a *lot* of unchecked errors in
there. We would benefit from setting guidelines establishing
- Which sorts of errors should be handled in callers
- Which sorts of errors should be handled (ie: just reported) in callees
- Which sorts of errors should be handled in neither callers nor callees
(are there any of these?)
- Whether is it ever legitimate for a caller to not check the return code
from a callee which can return -EFOO. (I suspect not - it probably
indicates a misdesign in the callee, as in this case).
-
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