Jeff Garzik posted a series of nine patchs to the lkml titled to "remove [the] 'irq' argument from all irq handlers", explaining, "the overwhelming majority of drivers do not ever bother with the 'irq' argument that is passed to each driver's irq handler. Of the minority of drivers that do use the arg, the majority of those have the irq number stored in their private-info structure somewhere." He noted that he had no intention to push the patches upstream anytime soon.

Feedback was entirely positive, with Thomas Gleixner suggesting, "Full ACK. We should do this right at the edge of -rc1. And let's do this right now in .24 and not drag it out for no good reason." Ingo Molnar concurred, "full ACK on the concept from me too. Please go ahead! :)" Eric Biederman noted that there was still work to be done, "the practical question is how do we make this change without breaking the drivers that use their irq argument." Jeff agreed, explaining why the code won't be pushed upstream during -rc1, "I am finding a ton of bugs in each get_irqfunc_irq() driver, so I would rather patiently sift through them, and push fixes and cleanups upstream. Once that effort is done, everything should be in the 'trivial' pile and not have the logic that you are worried about (and thus there would be no need to add an additional branch to the irq handling path)."