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SubjectRe: 2.3 wish: integrate pcmcia into mainstream kernel
On Thu, Jun 03, 1999 at 01:59:05PM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> The only reason normal drivers don't know about insertion and removal is
> because they haven't had to deal with it before. We'll make them deal with
> it. It would be easy to add a per-interrupt-descriptor "disable" bit, for
> example, so that when a specific card was removed only THAT particular
> interrupt never happens any more (so PCMCIA devices could use the normal
> "request_irq()" and "free_irq()" logic, and yet we'd make it work right so
> that when a card is removed only THAT particular interrupt goes away -
> instead of getting interrupts from another card that got inserted).

Shouldn't the kernel have usage count for irqs? I thought request_irq(),
etc. only track activly listening drivers, not devices that will use it
later but aren't at this second (e.g. parallel ports for printing). This
would help some of the problems in PCMCIA in my limited understanding.

Isn't that good resource management too? This should also be applied for
driver mem and IO mem, too, no?

> This is the second and more insidious problem with the current PCMCIA
> "outside the mainline kernel" - none of the PCMCIA issues ever get fixed.
> Because nothing else would be using them - the infrastructure just never
> gets built up, and then you complain about the fact that you can't find
> out what interrupts are in use.

I think that the PCMCIA packages suffers from one major problem, the rest
of these problems are just symptoms of this problem: The PCMCIA package is
two things that are separate: an enabler daemon and the drivers.

The drivers should be in the kernel and the enabler should be in
user land. I see no reason why a computer with a PCMCIA device (net card
or some such) shouldn't be able to compile in only the net card and
nothing else from the PCMCIA stuff, allowing the system to automatically
deal with this one card and nothing else.

Yes you loose hotswap, but who cares, it should still be an option.

All this doesn't fix the fact that install via BIOS pre-kernel-boot PCMCIA
devices will always be a special case.

Ciao!

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