Discussion on the future of floppies in 5.x and 6.x

[Peter Jeremy]

On Fri, Jan 09, 2004 at 04:26:54PM -0600, Matthew D. Fuller wrote:
>On Fri, Jan 09, 2004 at 02:23:58PM -0700 I heard the voice of
>Scott Long, and lo! it spake thus:
>> Dag-Erling Sm?rgrav wrote:
>> >
>> >yes, we need something like
>> >
>> >struct pci_device_info {
>> >        uint32_t        pciid;
>> >        char            brand[64];
>> >        char            model[64];
>> >} my_supported_devices[] = {
>> >        { 0x12345678, "Acme", "Nutcracker 2000" }
>> >};
>> >
>> >which is placed in a separate ELF section so we can extract it from
>> >the module.
>> >
>> >except it needs to be flexible enough to support other buses than PCI
>> >(SBUS, USB...)
>> >
>> >DES
>> 
>> Yeah, this is a good suggestion, the only problem being in making it 
>> flexible enough to not be a burden on the drivers.  Many drivers
>> keep one or more flag elements in their tables to flag hardware than
>> needs special attention.  I'm sure that there are also countless other
>> pieces of state that drivers would want to associate with a table like
>> this.
>
>I was poking around a bit (in my completely kernel-fu-lacking way) at
>this last night.  For one thing, we could avoid the struct definition,
>and instead just mandate a few fields in the structure with given names
>as above.  Then, write a little helper .c file with a main() that goes
>through the array (with the name given as a preprocessor -D or something)
>and spits the info out into a text file.  Compile it up and run it for
>each module as we compile it, and assemble the results in a big reference
>file.  Then, a userland program (like sysinstall, in this case) can
>easily poke through that text file to find and describe the drivers for
>devices found.

This is more what I was thinking in terms of.  As well as the PCI ID
and brand/model, we probably would need:
- a priority field, so a generic driver can grab a device if a more
  specific driver isn't found
- the option to use card ID instead of chip ID
- wild-carding (maybe a bitmask)

And this still isn't enough to identify things like the Realtek 8139C+
chips that would prefer re(4) instead of rl(4) (though rl(4) is good
enough to install FreeBSD).

Peter