On Wednesday 16 April 2008, Tejun Heo wrote:Yeah, theoretically, you're right. The problem is that what breaks when
things go wrong. If you don't probe generic ports by default, harddisks
won't be detected on some legacy systems but you can always prompt the
user about loading the generic driver. If you probe generic ports by
default, when things go wrong, you break modern machines in an
unrecoverable (w/o reset) way. I'd rather choose bothering the user on
legacy machines.
The problem here is determining whether a machine is "legacy" or not.
So far in this discussion I've seen no suggestions how to do that (except maybe for my test whether /sys/bus/isa is present), which would mean asking _all_ users, and that's a damned ugly option.