Messages in this thread | | | Date | Tue, 12 Feb 2008 11:24:09 -0500 | From | Jeff Garzik <> | Subject | multiple drivers, single device (was Re: Announce: Linux-next (Or Andrew's dream :-))) |
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Greg KH wrote: > [1] Hopefully the "multiple drivers for a single device" feature people > have been asking for for years will be landing soon, of course the > number of odd places in the kernel that made the assumption that we > could only have one driver per device is causing lots of fun...
Color me a bit skeptical... we've always had this capability really: for multi-function devices, just register as many subsystems as you need. If your device is a network _and_ SCSI device, you can do that with today's APIs.
I just went through a long thread (e1000/e1000e) explaining how much pain multiple drivers for the same PCI ID cause on the distro side of things... its a mess. In each case you must write special case code to resolve the ambiguity. You never know which is the best driver to choose, or proper module load order -- which may vary depending on machine, not just static information captured from a kernel Makefile.
Jeff
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