Re: Should isa-pnp utilize the PnP BIOS?

[Jeremy Jackson <jerj@coplanar.net>]

Thomas Hood wrote:

> On my ThinkPad 600, The ThinkPad PnP BIOS configures
> all PnP devices at boot time.
>
> If I load the isa-pnp.o driver it never detects any ISA PnP
> devices: it says "isapnp: No Plug & Play device found".  This
> is unfortunate, because it means that device drivers can't
> find out from isa-pnp where the devices are.
>
> David Hinds's pcmcia-cs package contains driver code that
> interfaces with the PnP BIOS.  With it, one can list the resource
> usage of ISA PnP devices (serial and parallel ports, sound chip,
> etc.) and set them, using the "lspnp" and "setpnp" commands.
>
> Would it not be useful if the isa-pnp driver would fall back
> to utilizing the PnP BIOS (if possible) in order to read and

I would find this EXTREMELY usefull... my Compaq laptop's
hot-dock with power eject will only work if Linux uses
PnP BIOS's insert/eject methods.

I saw some code in early 2.3 that would talk to bios, i still have
a tarball, but it seems 2.4 only does hardware banging (best in
*most* cases...)

>
> change ISA PnP device configurations when it can't do this
> itself?  If so, could this perhaps be done by bringing the Hinds
> PnP BIOS driver into the kernel and interfacing isa-pnp to it?