On Tue, 22 Feb 2005 11:19:10 -0800 (PST), Linus Torvalds <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > On Mon, 21 Feb 2005, Jon Smirl wrote: > > > > I was working on the assumption that all PCI based, VGA class hardware > > that is not the boot device needs to be posted. > > I don't think that's true. We certainly don't _want_ it to be true in the > long run - and even now there are cards that we can initialize fully > without using the BIOS at all. > > > And that the posting should occur before the drivers are > > loaded. > > Personally, I'd much rather let the driver be involved in the decision. > > That may mean that the probe routine knows how to initialize the card, but > it may mean that it does an "exec_usermodehelper()" kind of thing. > Actually, I'd prefer it if this was largely up to "udev": if the driver > notices that it can't initialize the card, why not just enumerate it > enough that "udev" knows about it (that's pretty much automatic), and let > the driver just ignore the card until some (possibly much later) date when > the user level scripts have found it and initialized it. > > That would imply that the driver have some "re-attach" entrypoint (which > migth be a ioctl, but might also be just a /sysfs file access), which is > the user-lands way of saying "try again - I've now initialized the > hardware". >
This sounds awfully like firmware loader that seems to be working just fine for a ranfe of network cards and other devices. -- Dmitry - 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/
