> In <Pine.SOL.4.05.9907142232410.24848-100000@csa.cs.technion.ac.il> Alon Ziv (alonz@cs.Technion.AC.IL) wrote:
>
> > BTW, with all this talk about hotplug and such, I haven't seen any
> > suggestions for solving the problem of persistently mapping the physical
> > hardware to logical device numbers; we need some way to have the system
> > allocate the same major/minor number to the same hardware whenever it's
> > used... Any ideas?
>
> devfs and complete removal of major/minor numbers ?
>
>
Still doesn't cut it.
Even with devfs, we need some method of mapping the available hardware to
the device drivers, so that we know which driver to configure when a
specific device is accessed.
Consider a (hypothetical?) completely modular system; it will use modules
for everything except core kernel functionality, loading modules using
kmod, and its device tree is provided by devfs. Now, how will devfs know
which entries to put in /dev? And, if a device is accessed for the first
time, it will still need to know that (say) /dev/mixer0 is the onboard
Yamaha mixer, while /dev/mixer1 is the AWE128...
Kapish?
-az
------------------------+----------------------------------------------------
. __ | Phone: +972 3 5340753 (home), +972 3 9685882 (work)
_| / | email: alonz@usa.net
/ | /_ Alon Ziv | smail: 33 Ha-Rama St., Ganey Tiqwah 55900, Israel
------------------------+----------------------------------------------------
<<<(((this place reserved for that ultra-wise oneliner I haven't found.)))>>>
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/