On Mon, 19 Jul 2004, Oliver Neukum wrote: > Yes, preferably structured and well versioned. You'd deal with reports > like: "I am using an mm-kernel with Debian's blacklist .deb of XX/XX/XX > and this patch my friend Charly sent me which I partially applied by hand" > only to find out a week later that he forgot to remake his initrd. > Separating kernel and blacklist is a bad idea.
Separating kernel and blacklist is no different in principle from separating kernel and device driver installation. Are you saying that the entire hotplug & udev system is a bad idea? > > Can it? I wondered about that. How does a userspace program tell the > > kernel to bind a particular device to a particular driver? Or more > > accurately, to pass that device to the driver's probe() routine? > > Almost entirely. Usbfs' approach can be generalised. Usbfs doesn't offer any way to say "Bind this device to the usb-storage driver". Anyway, for the point I was making the exact mechanism doesn't matter. The main idea was that driver probing decisions should be configurable from userspace but currently they aren't. > You can't ignore errors. A partially evaluated entry might be much worse > than nothing. That's a policy decision which can be left up to the individual driver. There's no reason the core should have to worry about it. > > > Introducing new interfaces to user space is not an unqualified good thing. > > > > Remember that there already is an existing precedent for this sort of > > thing in the SCSI driver. So this isn't really a _new_ interface; it's a > > generalization of an existing interface. > > True. But that doesn't make the existing interface a good idea. I wonder what James Bottomley would have to say... But consider the alternative. Do you really think it's a good thing to accumulate a never-ending series of error-prone cruft in the form of blacklist entries permanently living in the kernel? Alan Stern ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by BEA Weblogic Workshop FREE Java Enterprise J2EE developer tools! Get your free copy of BEA WebLogic Workshop 8.1 today. http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=4721&alloc_id=10040&op=click _______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe, use the last form field at: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/linux-usb-devel
