Re: Christmas list for the kernel

From: Pierre Ossman
Date: Wed Nov 23 2005 - 10:39:08 EST


Russell King wrote:
On Wed, Nov 23, 2005 at 04:20:00PM +0100, Pierre Ossman wrote:
But if no hardware is connected to those devices, then where does the driver route the setserial stuff?

setserial /dev/ttyS2 port 0x200 irq 5 autoconfig

and you might then end up with another serial port detected. If
/dev/ttyS2 and above do not exist, you can't do that. That would
in turn effectively prevent folk with some serial cards using them
with Linux without editing and rebuilding their kernel.


Ah. But why is this not done through module parameters? That would be more consistent with how you specify resources for other drivers.

As for the rest of the "setserial stuff" it gets recorded against
the port and remembered for when the hardware turns up, which it
may do if it's your PCMCIA modem card.


This could be a bit more questionable. Setting the initial state of hardware is better done (IMHO) by reacting to some hotplug event. E.g. fedora uses an 'install' line in modprobe.conf to restore mixer state for sound cards.

Rgds
Pierre

-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/