configurable device (and other) tables in the kernel ?

[John-Mark Gurney]

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."