Henrique de Moraes Holschuh <hmh@debian.org> writes:
> The parallel port itself is in either PnP or ACPI tables, so the kernel
> notices it exists and fires up an coldplug event. Udev knows to load
> parport_pc in that case. In fact all "udev autodetection" works like this:
> it is kernel autodetection from the PnP-friendly PCI space, ACPI device
> tables, and PnPBIOS tables.
>
> So far, so good.
>
> But there is *NO* such provision for "lp", unless you told the kernel you
> wanted it built-in.
OK, this makes sense.
> If you need "lp", you either load it in through discover (which, unlike
> udev, has the task of finding out all high and low-level drivers that should
> be loaded in a system), load it in through /etc/modules, load it on an
> initscript, etc.
I just installed discover on my i386 test system, and it didn't load
lp. I rebooted it to see what happened at startup, and it didn't load
lp then, either.
In a way, the fact that we have "lost" the facility to autoload
modules when the device node is opened, despite the existence of the
hotplug/udev/discover tools, is a usability problem. A lot of
"optional" but necessary devices are now requiring manual intervention
to set up, which is a step backward, IMO. Parallel ports are still
pretty common on PCs, and I don't think it should require manual set
up to use them.
Regards,
Roger
--
Roger Leigh
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