Docking station / PCI hotplug

[Martin Lucina <mato@kotelna.sk>]

Hi,



I was wondering what the current state of hotplug support for Docking

Stations is -- http://linux-hotplug.sourceforge.net/?selected=dock

mentions that PNPBIOS has support for sending 'dock' events to hotplug,

but I'm not seeing anything like this happening on my Toshiba Portege

7220CTe. Of course it's entirely likely that Toshiba's PNPBIOS simply

does not send such events.



The docking station (Toshiba DVD Network Dock II) has a 3Com 3C905C-TX

network port, a couple of USB ports, Serial, Paralell and S-Video ports

and obviously a DVD-ROM drive. Currently these all work fine and are

detected by Linux if the system is booted in a docked configuration. I

can also unplug the system from the dock while it is running if I down

the network interface and de-register the DVD ROM using 'hdparm -U'.



However, there appears to be no way to get these devices (at least the

3Com NIC) to work again if the system is re-docked at a later date,

without a reboot.



The problem with the NIC appears to be that even though I down the

device and rmmod 3c59x, when I re-dock the machine and modprobe 3c59x it

doesn't reinitialise the PCI device correctly (it sees the device, but

the EA is ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff, and nothing works).



I've noticed that the 2.6 kernel (I'm currently running 2.6.2) comes

with a "Fake PCI Hotplug Controller". This currently only supports

removing devices but looking at comments in the source could probably be

adapted to adding devices without too much work. Now, having only

recently started using 2.6.x, I'm not up to speed on how the new APIs

work, but what I'd like to see (and am prepared to implement, given time

and some guidance on where to look) is:



1. A sysfs-based (I presume) interface that allows me to 

   - remove PCI devices from the system

   - add them back again, fully re-initializing the PCI device

   - rescan a PCI bus for new devices



2. A similar interface for IDE devices. The current 'hdparm -U' and

'hdparm -R' stuff seems to be a bit of a hack.



For 1), I presume the place to start is the PCI Hotplug code? 



For 2) -- ? The existing register/unregister code in the IDE drivers?



Is anyone else working on this at the moment?



Cheers,



-mato



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