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SubjectRe: Module Ideas: Persistence, PnP, and more...
On Mon, Sep 07, 1998 at 09:37:09AM +0100, David Howells wrote:
> The reason I put it all in the kernel is so that it was available _before_
> the mass storage device drivers and thus filesystems and thus usermode
> programs were available.

While I think you're on the right track, it is probably possible to do
the same thing using initrd, romfs and user-space utilities.

> It presents a unified interface to the drivers, such that they don't need to
> know how the hardware is interfaced to the CPU.

That is a very important thing for long term maintainability, IMO.

> But it also means that devices _and_ drivers can be reconfigured 'in-flight'
> as it were. All that is required is that the driver be aware that the
> configuration can change, and provide a callback so that the configuration
> manager can update it. This is, however, optional... the driver can be set in
> stone by the loading process still.

Nice, but not sure there's any real need for this. I expect some
devices (not the drivers, but the devices or clones) might get upset at
having their ports and interrupts reconfigured while they're running.

OTOH, we really could do with shutting down and starting up for ACPI.

> Also, the negotiation for configuration isn't actually that big an algorithm
> (under 5K), and uses suprisingly little memory for an a normal sort of lashup
> (a temporary 3K for around 25 devices).

Maybe it is worth having the stuff to scan tables etc. in a module,
loaded as needed. It can also be linked in as __init/__initdata for the
initial boot process. Obviously the bare essentials for unloading
devices has to be kept around. I mean things like the equivalent of
pnpdump don't need to be around all the time.

> The drivers themselves have to do very little work.

Notably, some of the work the currently do can be moved out of the
drivers to be shared in the configuration manager.

-- Jamie

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