Re: configurable device (and other) tables in the kernel ?

Warner Losh wrote this message on Thu, Feb 01, 2007 at 11:02 -0700:
On the one hand, I like the flexibility of having the ability to look
at a device and know what driver(s) may attach to it w/o having the
drivers in memory, since that allows us to move to a demand load
model for those people that want it. Right now, there's no way to
smartly extract the plug and play info used by the device probe
routines to bid on a device from the drivers to try to smartly load,
say, the atheros driver when an atheros cardbus card is inserted.

Hmmm.. couldn't we do something like dedicate a section to a simple
table that contains the PCI id's and related data to match.. Then
we could have a tool that embeds the PCI id data from a plain text
file and recreates the plain text file from the section...

This doesn't solve the cases where the driver needs to handle a device
specially, but w/ the text file, and the driver using the table, it'd
be easy to do an on demand load pass... (and for new devices, users
would be able to test drivers w/o having to recompile the module)..

And as part of installation, it lists the modules that are necessary
to boot in loader.conf...

Just a thought...

--
John-Mark Gurney Voice: +1 415 225 5579

"All that I will do, has been done, All that I have, has not."
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