Subject: Re: marching unit numbers
To: Warner Losh <imp@village.org>
From: Bill Sommerfeld <sommerfeld@orchard.arlington.ma.us>
List: tech-kern
Date: 12/31/1999 18:54:20
> This is wrong.  A substantial number of network cards do not have
> their MAC Address in the CIS.  The MAC Address extention is relatively
> recent thing.  

ahh well, sampling error on my part. there are, no doubt, other ways
to accomplish this (something akin to the "match" routine could do
it..).

> I think that this is going to be hard to do in general.  You have a
> chicken an egg problem.  The driver will know how to get a unique
> identifier from the device, if possible, but would have no place to
> store that identifier that would be persistant accross a detach
> (assuming that the softc goes away with the detach).

well, since we're talking about NetBSD, the other place is in the
locators in the "struct cfdata".  if we can dynamically add these on
the fly (which you want to do if you want to support dynamic
loading/unloading of drivers), rather than having them allocated in a
single array as they are now, it becomes a simple matter of cloning
the wildcard's cfdata into a more-specific cfdata with the appropriate
locators in it..

					- Bill