Re: hotplug (was Re: Option N.V. Wireless WAN modem driver)

[Roy Marples <roy%marples.name@localhost>]

On Tuesday 28 July 2009 09:59:48 Iain Hibbert wrote:
> On Mon, 27 Jul 2009, Joerg Sonnenberger wrote:
> > On Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 09:02:05AM +0100, Iain Hibbert wrote:
> > > I see that some other drivers handle the transition automatically but
> > > I find that a little distasteful and would prefer to have some kind of
> > > hotplug manager for that.
> >
> > I disagree. The Linux approach of using a userland component is a mess.
> > Please do not duplicate that.
>
> I'm not sure how you are proposing to handle newly inserted USB disks,
> CDs, PCMCIA wireless cards etc.. do you suggest that the kernel should
> just configure them automatically as they appear?
>
> I can't saying anything about any Linux implementations as I've never used
> it, just that the concept of a hotplug manager being separate from the
> driver itself is more pleasing to me, as it provides a central control
> mechanism.

I have patches for wpa_supplicant to handle hotplugging of network interfaces 
on BSD. However, upstream currently think that something else should hotplug 
wpa_supplicant (which is odd as it's wpa_supplicant already has a lot of code 
for hotplugging). The other issue is that there is only 1 driver for BSD 
whereas Linux has quite a few and they wouldn't interact nicely with each 
other.

dhcpcd already handles hotplugging network interfaces.

Thanks

Roy