Subject: Re: Driver to device bindings
To: Matt Thomas <matt@3am-software.com>
From: Perry E. Metzger <perry@piermont.com>
List: tech-kern
Date: 12/28/2003 17:59:29
Matt Thomas <matt@3am-software.com> writes:
>> > No, you need to update the driver itself to attach to the new
>> > vendor/device ID for this.
>>
>>It might be neat if, instead, we could keep a table binding drivers to
>>PCI IDs etc. separately so that people could update it without having
>>to update the drivers themselves.
>
> That doesn't really help.  In addition to the PCI Vendor/Device ID (or
> subsystem IDs), you will probably need a driver-dependent glob to actually
> tell the driver the capabilities of the device.  wm, bge, siop, esiop, tlp,
> ahc, etc. all need that info as well as the PCI vendor/device ID.

True enough, but imagine someday we'd like to load drivers at run time
based on the IDs. For that, we can't leave all the information in the
driver itself because then we'd have to load and unload every driver
we have...

-- 
Perry E. Metzger		perry@piermont.com