Re: Christmas list for the kernel

Vojtech Pavlik
2005-11-23T14:44:40Z

On Tue, Nov 22, 2005 at 04:41:02PM -0500, Jon Smirl wrote:
> On 11/22/05, Kasper Sandberg <lkml@metanurb.dk> wrote:
> > > Currently you have to compile most of this stuff into the kernel.
> > forgive my ignorance, but whats stopping you from doing this now?
>
> It would be better if all of the legacy drivers could exist on
> initramfs and only be loaded if the actual hardware is present. With
> the current code someone like Redhat has to compile all of the legacy
> support into their distribution kernel. That code will be present even
> on new systems that don't have the hardware.
>
> An example of this is that the serial driver is hard coded to report
> four legacy serial ports when my system physically only has two. I
> have to change a #define and recompile the kernel to change this.

Interesting. Something goes wrong on your system - I have only a single
serial port on my machine and it's correctly identified by PnP, with no
other ports showing up.

> The goal should be able to build something like Knoppix without
> Knoppix needing any device probing scripts. Linux is 90% of the way
> there but not 100% yet.
>
> X is also part of the problem. Even if the kernel nicely identifies
> all of the video hardware and input devices, X ignores this info and
> looks for everything again anyway. In a more friendly system X would
> use the info the kernel provides and automatically configure itself
> for the devices present or hotplugged. You could get rid of your
> xorg.cong file in this model.

There is always the hope. :)

--
Vojtech Pavlik
SuSE Labs, SuSE CR