Re: Comments about commit 'PCI: docking station: remove dock uevents'?

[Matthew Garrett <mjg59@srcf.ucam.org>]

On Sun, Nov 12, 2006 at 03:07:37PM +0100, Holger Macht wrote:

> I'm currently looking at docking station support for various
> laptops/vendors and what can be done to get them working. At the moment,
> userspace has to do some quirks to get support for them. For instance,
> when docking an X60 into a docking station where a SATA DVD drive is
> located, userland has to rescan the scsi host for the drive to show up.

Does the docking not generate a bus rescan event on the SATA bus? If it 
does, it's just a special case of ACPI drive hotplugging. You can't do 
it reliably from userspace, but I think Kirsten has been looking at 
doing it properly in the kernel.

> Additionally, currently the dock driver automatically executes the _DCK
> method when it detects a dock/undock event. Wouldn't it be good to have
> common sysfs interface for docking so that userland can trigger the
> dock/undock? This way userland would also be able to do 'something before'
> docking/undocking, such as unregistering a device, showing a poput that it
> is now save to physically undock, etc.

When the dock contains a drive, I think there's possibly an argument in 
favour of this. Otherwise, the hardware should be able to deal with it - 
every ACPI-based dock I've played with has had some indication to inform 
the user that the device has disconnected.

-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59@srcf.ucam.org