Date: Sat, 10 Jan 2004 17:50:54 +1100 From: Peter Jeremy <peterjeremy@optushome.com.au> To: "Matthew D. Fuller" <fullermd@over-yonder.net> Cc: Scott Long <scottl@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: Discussion on the future of floppies in 5.x and 6.x Message-ID: <20040110065054.GS25474@server.vk2pj.dyndns.org> In-Reply-To: <20040109222654.GS48603@over-yonder.net> References: <200401091400.40550.doconnor@gsoft.com.au> <3FFE5211.5040606@freebsd.org> <xzp1xq91oei.fsf@dwp.des.no> <20040109.075929.90380697.imp@bsdimp.com> <xzpad4xxhcs.fsf@dwp.des.no> <20040109210153.GP25474@server.vk2pj.dyndns.org> <xzpoetckf1k.fsf@dwp.des.no> <3FFF1BEE.9090400@freebsd.org> <20040109222654.GS48603@over-yonder.net>
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On Fri, Jan 09, 2004 at 04:26:54PM -0600, Matthew D. Fuller wrote:
>On Fri, Jan 09, 2004 at 02:23:58PM -0700 I heard the voice of
>Scott Long, and lo! it spake thus:
>> Dag-Erling Sm?rgrav wrote:
>> >
>> >yes, we need something like
>> >
>> >struct pci_device_info {
>> > uint32_t pciid;
>> > char brand[64];
>> > char model[64];
>> >} my_supported_devices[] = {
>> > { 0x12345678, "Acme", "Nutcracker 2000" }
>> >};
>> >
>> >which is placed in a separate ELF section so we can extract it from
>> >the module.
>> >
>> >except it needs to be flexible enough to support other buses than PCI
>> >(SBUS, USB...)
>> >
>> >DES
>>
>> Yeah, this is a good suggestion, the only problem being in making it
>> flexible enough to not be a burden on the drivers. Many drivers
>> keep one or more flag elements in their tables to flag hardware than
>> needs special attention. I'm sure that there are also countless other
>> pieces of state that drivers would want to associate with a table like
>> this.
>
>I was poking around a bit (in my completely kernel-fu-lacking way) at
>this last night. For one thing, we could avoid the struct definition,
>and instead just mandate a few fields in the structure with given names
>as above. Then, write a little helper .c file with a main() that goes
>through the array (with the name given as a preprocessor -D or something)
>and spits the info out into a text file. Compile it up and run it for
>each module as we compile it, and assemble the results in a big reference
>file. Then, a userland program (like sysinstall, in this case) can
>easily poke through that text file to find and describe the drivers for
>devices found.
This is more what I was thinking in terms of. As well as the PCI ID
and brand/model, we probably would need:
- a priority field, so a generic driver can grab a device if a more
specific driver isn't found
- the option to use card ID instead of chip ID
- wild-carding (maybe a bitmask)
And this still isn't enough to identify things like the Realtek 8139C+
chips that would prefer re(4) instead of rl(4) (though rl(4) is good
enough to install FreeBSD).
Peter
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