netdev - Re: [PATCH net-next] net: phy: fix issue with loading PHY driver w/o initramfs

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Message-ID: <b9f13269-b365-b90e-b94a-184b0d28b5a4@gmail.com>
Date:   Wed, 23 Jan 2019 07:08:26 +0100
From:   Heiner Kallweit <hkallweit1@...il.com>
To:     David Miller <davem@...emloft.net>
Cc:     krzk@...nel.org, andrew@...n.ch, f.fainelli@...il.com,
        netdev@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH net-next] net: phy: fix issue with loading PHY driver w/o
 initramfs

On 22.01.2019 23:45, David Miller wrote:
> From: Heiner Kallweit <hkallweit1@...il.com>
> Date: Sat, 19 Jan 2019 10:30:21 +0100
> 
>> It was reported that on a system with nfsboot and w/o initramfs network
>> fails because trying to load the PHY driver returns -ENOENT. Reason was
>> that due to missing initramfs the modprobe binary isn't available.
>> So we have to ignore error code -ENOENT.
>>
>> Fixes: 13d0ab6750b2 ("net: phy: check return code when requesting PHY driver module")
>> Reported-by: Krzysztof Kozlowski <krzk@...nel.org>
>> Signed-off-by: Heiner Kallweit <hkallweit1@...il.com>
> 
> Applied.
> 
> However, I agree with Geert that we should adopt the:
> 
> 	if (module_not_present)
> 		request_module();
> 	if (module_not_present)
> 		goto failed_to_load;
> 
> pattern.
> 
I know this is the standard pattern for request_module().
Unfortunately the situation is a little bit tricky with PHY drivers.
We don't know whether there's a module matching the PHY ID and
it's a valid use case that there's no such module.
In such a case we bind the genphy driver later, and a lot of PHY's
are totally happy with the genphy driver and therefore no dedicated
PHY drivers exist.