Here are two additional PCMCIA issues:

Minor: it would be nice if PCMCIA could be configured at the same step
as the kernel, ideally using a single .config, and particularly not
requiring more manual interaction than, say,  yes n | make oldconfig
(There are of course other ways than kernel integration to solve this.)

Major: when porting Linux to new platforms, it's actually quite
unlikely that all the parts needed to run the current PCMCIA code are
available from early on. We've hit this in the Linux-7k project (Psion,
Geofox, etc.). The solution was to put a little PCMCIA enabler into the
kernel that is just intelligent enough to identify some of the most
common flash disk cards.

I've posted this to linux-kernel about two weeks ago, asking for
comments. David Woodhouse responded that there's a group of people
looking at the same issue for certain embedded devices. Their main
concern seems to be space: if you only have a few MB of total storage
for your system, you don't want initrd, cardmgr, insmod, etc.

Their approach seems to be closer to David Hind's PCMCIA tools than
my quick hack. Unfortunately, I haven't had time to look at their code
yet, but it seems as if some way to "map" the user-space tools onto
the kernel could be the solution that makes everybody happy.

- Werner

-- 
  _________________________________________________________________________
 / Werner Almesberger, DI-ICA,EPFL,CH   werner.almesberger@lrc.di.epfl.ch /
/_IN_R_131__Tel_+41_21_693_6621__Fax_+41_21_693_6610_____________________/

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