twa driver needs updating

[LI Xin]

Gary Palmer wrote:
> Since we still build a bunch of drivers into the kernel, how do you 
> propose replacing a driver that is part of GENERIC?  I think implementing
> the above feature will mean fundamentally changing the way we ship
> kernels.

A quick hack around this would be to make it possible to boot from the
"Driver disc" and it saves the new kernel into some memory based images,
e.g. tmpfs or whatever, then asks for installation disc; maybe even put
sysinstall(8) on the driver disc so that it knows what to grab from the
old distribution disc and what to patch.

For on-hard disk installation replacing drivers within kernel is do-able
because we already have some mechanism to make sure that loaded module
has better priority of obtaining controls over the hardware.

For long term solution we should make sure that drivers are unload-able
at run time, but this would involve a lot of infrastructural changes on
kernel, e.g. the way we dynamically link the kernel, or even disable
part of the kernel.

Cheers,
-- 
Xin LI <delphij at delphij.net>	http://www.delphij.net/
FreeBSD - The Power to Serve!

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