Re: RFC: discover 1 -> 2 transition plan for Debian
> On Tue, Mar 16, 2004 at 03:37:50PM +0100, Petter Reinholdtsen wrote:
> > [Jeff Bailey]
> > > I'm curious, though. The new hotplug seems to have the goal of
> > > replacing discover. It may make sense to use that instead of
> > > discover2 on 2.6 based systems (since it's likely that everyone will
> > > want it anyway)
Actually it always had this goal, but it has never did this on debian
because we lack a tiny helper program which nobody ever bothered to
package.
So with minimal efforts hotplug could load modules for PCI devices on
2.4 kernels as well.
> > I've experienced some problems with hotplug earlier, as it is using
> > the info in /lib/modules/<version>/modules.*map directly. If more
> > than one module claim to support a given PCI id, it seem to pick any
> > one of them. The tools having a separate hw database have an
> > advantage here, where the maintainers can select which of these
> > modules to use for a given PCI id. Is this problem solved with newer
> > hotplug versions?
Petter, this is not a problem but a feature. Actually I consider
discover broken by design because it needs a proprietary database which
must be updated for each driver added to the kernel and for each new
device supported by each driver.
There is a small number of devices which have two different drivers, and
they do because one of them is broken (or even both are, for different
hardware flavours). You should consider this a kernel bug.
I think there is a very small number of these devices in 2.6 kernels,
which can be easily be blacklisted even in the default install.
I definitely welcome more input on this.
Hardware detection in linux in the future will be more and more tied to
kernel drivers, look also at the pci:* and usb:* aliases in
/lib/modules/2.6.4/modules.alias, which in the future will allow to
semplify a lot the hotplug scripts (and as you can see do not even
support having two drivers for the same device).
I'd like to discuss more about the future of hotplug and discover in
debian, so I encourage interested parties to look for me and Ukai on
IRC or to send mail to debian-boot (but please always Cc me as I only
skim the list from time to time).
--
ciao, |
Marco | [5130 per7fuVLHQxf2]
Reply to: