Messages in this thread | | | Date | Thu, 3 Jun 1999 11:37:52 -0700 (PDT) | From | Linus Torvalds <> | Subject | Re: 2.3 wish: integrate pcmcia into mainstream kernel |
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On Thu, 3 Jun 1999, David Hinds wrote: > > Background: The RH6.0 standard boot image is 98% full, with 35K free: > space for maybe one or two additional drivers. The core PCMCIA > components (pcmcia_core.o, ds.o, i82365.o, tcic.o, cardmgr) plus the > ide_cs driver take up about 115K uncompressed, 70K compressed.
Almost none of that would be needed, at least for the normal IDE CD case.
The normal built-in IDE driver can obviously driev the hardware. If the _only_ thing we did in kernel space was some very simple cardbus logic (PCI-only, detect the cardbus chip, query it for devices, and handle the special cases that we care about), I bet it wouldn't be more than a few kB worth of driver.
And _because_ it would be integrated into the standard kernel, it woul dnow make sense to have the regular IDE driver be aware of the pluggability issues. It already knows about some of them, but it's not really all that integrated.
Do the same for floppy controllers, and you've covered 95% of all modern notebook issues with 5% of the effort.
> The > overhead for config files is minimal if we are only handling IDE: say > 1K for the rc script, and just a couple lines for a config file for > IDE devices. Bottom line: 70K > 35K, it won't fit.
I disagree. Bottom line: a kernel that is 5kB larger, partly because of the cardbus detection code, partly because of slightly enhanced support for it in the current drivers.
> PCMCIA floppy support in general is painful because of the DMA issue.
Floppies in _general_ are painful. The floppy driver is the LARGEST driver in the whole kernel, and most of that is just code to take care of really stupid issues with DMA and interrupts.
[ well, technically there are larger drivers, but they tend to do a lot more, and often a noticeable portion of the size is because they have downloadable sequencer code etc.. ]
Adding the code to make it know about some PCMCIA issues would make sense. But only if the kernel know about PCMCIA in the first place, something it doesn't right now.
Linus
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