Re: PCMCIA product id strings -> hashes generation at compilation time? [Was: Re: [patch 14/38] pcmcia: id_table for wavelan_cs]

[Greg KH <greg@kroah.com>]

On Wed, Mar 09, 2005 at 08:19:42AM +0100, Dominik Brodowski wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 09, 2005 at 04:45:09PM +1100, Benjamin Herrenschmidt wrote:
> > On Wed, 2005-03-09 at 00:16 +0100, Dominik Brodowski wrote:
> > > > Dominik Brodowski <linux@dominikbrodowski.net> wrote:
> > > > >
> > > > > Most pcmcia devices are matched to drivers using "product ID strings"
> > > > >  embedded in the devices' Card Information Structures, as "manufactor ID /
> > > > >  card ID" matches are much less reliable. Unfortunately, these strings cannot
> > > > >  be passed to userspace for easy userspace-based loading of appropriate
> > > > >  modules (MODNAME -- hotplug), so my suggestion is to also store crc32 hashes
> > > > >  of the strings in the MODULE_DEVICE_TABLEs, e.g.:
> > > > > 
> > > > >  PCMCIA_DEVICE_PROD_ID12("LINKSYS", "E-CARD", 0xf7cb0b07, 0x6701da11),
> > > > 
> > > > What is the difficulty in passing these strings via /sbin/hotplug arguments?
> > > 
> > > The difficulty is that extracting and evaluating them breaks the wonderful 
> > > bus-independent MODNAME implementation for hotplug suggested by Roman Kagan
> > > ( http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.hotplug.devel/7039 ), and that these
> > > strings may contain spaces and other "strange" characters. The latter may be 
> > > worked around, but the former cannot. /etc/hotplug/pcmcia.agent looks really
> > > clean because of this MODNAME implementation:
> > 
> > Same goes with Open Firmware match strings that we are about to pass
> > down to userspace as well. Hotplug will have to learn to deal with
> > those.
> 
> Hotplug isn't the tricky part. file2alias is. Any idea on how to do that?

I do not, sorry.  Rusty's the person to bug about that.

good luck,

greg k-h