* Linas Vepstas <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > On Tue, Nov 13, 2007 at 09:01:29AM -0800, Greg KH wrote: > > > > Also, some companies already provide userspace tools to get > > all of this information about the different slots in a system > > and what is where, from userspace, no kernel changes are > > needed. So, why add all this extra complexity to the kernel > > if it is not needed? > > Second that motion.... I don't get it. What are the goals of > this patch, really? Just to get a "slot geographical location" > from the kernel?
Yes, plus some general cleanups in the PCI hotplug space (more patches queued up, pending the results of this series ;) But to use the word "just" kinda implies that this is a trivial feature that no one really cares about, which I'm not really sure I agree with. Slot geographical location is important for managability folks, who want to know which slot out of 192 (on a big HP ia64 system, e.g.) that their failing network card might be sitting in. And again, we (HP ia64) need to get this information from the kernel. > I'm balancing the intellectual appeal of having a kernel struct > for representing physical objects, against the headache of > reading (debugging, modifying) code that has yet another struct > doing yet another thing. So far, the dread of future headaches > is winning. Well, hopefully, the future is cleaner, rather than messier. ;) > On pseries systems, I deal with something called the > "partitionable endpoint", which I think probably usually > corresponds to physical slots, but I don't really know. > > So, naively, the physical slot concept doesn't really map to > what I have to work with; it just adds one more appendix to it > all, one more thing to get confused about. Sorry, I'm a bit ignorant about pseries -- what kind of name does your PCI hotplug driver give to those slots? What shows up in /sys/bus/pci/slots/? > To be clear: above remarks are for the PowerPC boxes. I have no > clue about how things work on the IBM Intel-based boxes. And > Greg's original "get IBM to agree" remark is about the > Intel-based boxes. A split house. I have no idea how Proliants work either. :) Thanks. /ac - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
