Right. It _can_.
It's not a question of "possible" vs "impossible". It's a question of
"practical" vs "impractical" and a question of verification.
The verification part comes in through the fact that the way things are
set up right now, nobody _ever_ uses the PCMCIA package the same way
during installation as they use it in everyday use. Basically, right now
the everyday use gets tested every day, and the installation use gets
tested once in a blue moon, if even that.
Anybody surprised that there are problems at install time? Not me.
In contrast, the regular built-in device drivers almost never have any
trouble at installation time, because they have been extremely heavily
tested every single bootup to make sure that they always find the device
reliably. They are known to not need any special parameters in 99% of all
cases.
If you look at the PCMCIA stuff, because of how it is set up, special
parameters are _accepted_ and considered to be perfectly fine. And that
means that they tend to flourish, rather than be frowned upon. All of
which means that installation is painful - once it is all installed it
works beautifully.
Linus
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