Re: More linker magic..

Jakub Jelinek (jj@sunsite.ms.mff.cuni.cz)
Tue, 3 Aug 1999 23:21:06 +0200

On Tue, Aug 03, 1999 at 09:35:07PM +0100, Alan Cox wrote:
> > in my opinion. In fact, I'm not convinced even the above is acceptable. I
> > do not want people to introduce dependencies: if there are dependencies
> > then you might as well use the old-style "real initialization" sequence.
> > The whole point of automatic initialization is to make it easy to add
> > independent stuff.
> >
> > So I think the "automatic initialization" is really only useful for
> > anonymous stuff. Device drivers, normal kernel threads, that kind of
> > things. Anything more complicated might as well just do proper
>
> ISA device order has a lot of subtle ordering rules, some tied
> to PCI
>
> I2O before PCI
> Network cards in a strict order for ISA probes
> Sound cards before joysticks - ISA sound card order is critical
>
> Maybe for ISA we should just admit defeat and leave ISA devices as they
> are now

And cards on other buses (e.g. PCI or SBUS) should be probably initialized
within each category (ethernet, SCSI, etc.) according to bus addresses,
because simply leaving the initialization order on link order will make real
mess in device numbering.
BTW: I wonder if kernel should not use MODULE_PARM macros for kernel command
line (if the drivers provided MODULE_NAME, the option could look like
aha1542=irq=7).
This all has been addressed in Martin Mares' device changes proposal,
unfortunately it has not been coded so far and it is probably too late for
2.4 now.

Cheers,
Jakub
___________________________________________________________________
Jakub Jelinek | jj@sunsite.mff.cuni.cz | http://sunsite.mff.cuni.cz
Administrator of SunSITE Czech Republic, MFF, Charles University
___________________________________________________________________
UltraLinux | http://ultra.linux.cz/ | http://ultra.penguin.cz/
Linux version 2.3.13 on a sparc64 machine (1343.49 BogoMips)
___________________________________________________________________

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