On Thu, 27 Jun 1996, Jason Thorpe wrote:

> For "indirect" busses (e.g. ISA, VME), you have different semantics...the 
> bus has no mechanism for cards to say "I'm here", and no discrete 
> "slots".  Thus, the driver is called to probe for the device.  This is 
> why "indirect" busses don't support "cloning" (e.g. ed*).
> 
> The order of the "indirect" probes is dependent on the order in files.isa 
> (or whatever), last I checked..

Souldn't then the call to the drivers to do the probe obey the order of 
the devices in the CONFIG file? It wouldn't be much of a change to the 
actual config code, right? Actually, reading the files.isa and 
reorganizing its contents according to the order of appearance in 
the CONFIG file would do it, wouldn't it?

That would also eliminate conflicting probes, like the aha and bt probes, 
making generic kernels work when these two devices were present, just by 
putting the bt device before the aha device.

Any drawbacks for this scheme?