Russell King - ARM Linux Admin wrote:
>
> Philip Blundell writes:
> > as the console could. On platforms where the interrupt lines are fixed
> > (NetWinder and CATS for example, but not EBSA-285) it can do everything.
>
> Indeed - totally embedded machines like the NetWinder it is a good idea
> since you know 100% what you're dealing with. However, when talking about
> a plug in card, I'd rather not have 50 different initialisation themes in
> the kernel.
>
> > Also, experience shows that we tend to end up having code in the kernel to go
> > through and fix up things that the console didn't do the way we wanted them in
> > any case. We might as well not bother and just let the kernel do the whole
> > lot in the first place.
>
> I have two points here:
>
> 1. the kernel cannot possibly know the way the bus needs to be set up
> in every case.
>
> 2. a freebios could set up the PCI bus how we wanted it in the first place,
> while releaving the kernel of the task of knowing system X, Y and Z's
> peculiarities.
As far as I understand PCI, it seems that only IRQs are
backplane-specific. The other things are common to all PCI
implementations.
So I agree that we shouldn't do specific stuff in kernel,
so we could simply tell the kernel how card is wired and let it do
the remaining.
Only specific inits should be done in a mini bios.
And couldn't we detect IRQ used by a PCI card, just like the
detect them with ISA cards ?
Christophe
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