Thomas Davis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> How about just merging that into ifconfig? Really. ifconfig already
> has support things like IPX, so why not add it?
Yes, that is possible (if Philip accepts it). But we should probably use
our own version until we know that it is stable and were all happy with
it. Then we could move the code to ifconfig later.
> Is there any reason NOT to make everything look like a network device
> driver?
There have been some attempts by people to add IP routes to irda0 to make
it forward IP frames (thinking it was the IrLAN device), so there can be
some confusion.
> Also, make everything autoloadable; don't do a force load of the
> module(s). I know you do that with the irda module; maybe it's time to
> get a minor assigned to it, and just do a auto load of it. (personally,
> I'm a believer in the kmod stuff.. every single byte of memory we can
> save, by doing autoloading of modules only when needed is great!)
A good idea for 2.3. I would like to have a better way of handling the
configuration of the stack, and I agree with the many people that don't
like the irmanager.
The main reason why I removed the autoloading of IrDA kernel services was
because some IrDA devices has a lot of services, and you don't want to
start all those services at the same time just because you discover such a
device.
This could of course be spesified in a configuration file, so you could
choose which services to start (even depending on the device you discover),
but for me it's a "push forward" project.
So I would like to have everything autoloadable, but it should also be
possible to not have it (if you want to).
> I know the irmanager also does the force loading of the other modules;
> maybe it's time to start a kernel thread to do that too.
Yes, that is possible. But who starts the kernel thread? We would then have
to put some code into the Linux startup (init?) to make it start the IrDA
kernel thread (if IrDA is enabled). Then it would be possible to drop
irmanager altogether (or have it as an extra feature).
If somebody wants to look at this issue, it would be very nice. They must
make sure they sync with the USB/Firewire people so we know what they are
doing, since I think they have very similar "problems". I don't know if we
need to be able to boot from an IrDA connected hard-drive, but it would be
cool if it was possible ;-)
> Any ideas? I really would love to have just a single interface to the
> irda stack from user space.
I like the idea of having a single irconfig/ifconfig and a way to not have
irmanager mandatory anymore.
It would be nice if you wanted to look at this Thomas. I guess Pavel can be
of good help so you should talk to him if you want to try and fix this
stuff. Pavel will also make sure things work OK if you don't want to use
modules ;-)
-- Dag
--
/ Dag Brattli | The Linux-IrDA Project /
// University of Tromsoe, Norway | Infrared communication for Linux //
/// http://www.cs.uit.no/~dagb | http://www.cs.uit.no/linux-irda/ ///
