cvs commit: src/release/alpha dokern.sh drivers.conf

[Daniel O'Connor]

[moved to -hackers]

On Tue, 20 May 2003 11:07, Scott Long wrote:
> The third step is to make the installer actually install the
> user-supplied drivers.  Right now sysinstall has an option for loading
> KLD's from floppy, but that is all that it does.  It doesn't help much
> when the driver you are loading is the storage driver for your
> installtion, and once you reboot the driver is not loaded automatically.

You'd need some way of knowing whether it's worth trying to load the module - 
IMHO that is the difficult bit - it requires the most change to existing code 
and is more likely to break things.

> I've wanted to work on this for quite a while, but I'm not sure I want
> to further the viability of sysinstall.  However, others with less of a
> dislike of sysinstall are welcome to take this proposal and run with it.

If you tell me how to work out whether it's worth loading a given module from 
a floppy I will quite happily write the code to implement it.

Currently there is no special section which tells you whether you should try 
and load something because a known PCI ID is present (for example - and yes I 
know some modules use other criteria, but IMHO checking PCI ID's is a good 
start)

You could just trying loading every module on a disk but that is slow and you 
can't really tell if the loaded module actually did anything useful without 
kludgery.

IMHO the module itself should hold descriptions and lists of ID's, but if they 
have to be in a separate file then so be it.

Currently I don't see a way of extracting PCI IDs from module source in a 
standard way which means the lists would have to be maintained manually and 
that would _suck_. Perhaps some standard struct array could be used, and if 
it isn't present then you can't do a guess about whether to load the module 
or not, so you just prompt the user.

-- 
Daniel O'Connor software and network engineer
for Genesis Software - http://www.gsoft.com.au
"The nice thing about standards is that there
are so many of them to choose from."
  -- Andrew Tanenbaum
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