On Aug 29, 2013, at 8:54 AM, John Baldwin wrote:
> On Thursday, August 29, 2013 6:56:53 am Adrian Chadd wrote:
>> Hm! Are they dynamically loaded if you insert the cards?
>>
>> (Ie, has devd been taught about them as appropriate?)
>
> These are drivers for the bridges, not for cards you plug into the bridges.
> If you autoloaded them at all you would load them during boot when you saw an
> appropriate PCI device. Currently we don't autoload any PCI drivers, so I
> don't think that should be a blocker for taking these out of GENERIC.
>
> Warner is probably the best person to ask.
We don't autoload them. The bridge code is tiny and can easily be removed if
you want to create a custom kernel. There's still plenty of laptops that would
be crippled if these were removed. Other drivers that are even more obsolete
that are still in GENERIC:
esp
sym
trm
adv
adw
aic
bt
asr
ciss
iir
ida
de
cas
dc
gem
hme
nfe
nve
pcn (although many VM env like this)
rl
fs
sis
tl
tx
vr
wb
xl
cs
ed
ex
ep
fe
sn
xe
an
wi
urio
uipaq
aue
cue
kue
rue
So asking why cbb and cardbus are still there seems a little silly to me.
The basic problem is that our PCI and USB infrastructure doesn't include the
basic information necessarily to properly look at a directory of .ko files and
know what to autoload when it finds an unmatched device. PC Card could easily
do this, but doesn't (I have some doodles from a few years ago that would put
this stuff into an elf section that could (a) be unloaded after probe
(optionally) and (b) be read by automatic tools to load just what's needed).
USB is a lot closer than PCI, which is why Hans' scripts work well enough to
create uber-ugly devd config files.
Rather than shooting randomly, perhaps some investigation about this topic
would be in order. We've talked it to death, but nobody has had the time to
STFU and implement something reasonable.
Warner
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