Re: [PATCH] DMI-based module autoloading

[Lennart Poettering <mzxreary@0pointer.de>]

On Mon, 07.05.07 18:27, Greg KH (gregkh@suse.de) wrote:

Hi!

> On Tue, May 08, 2007 at 02:54:29AM +0200, Lennart Poettering wrote:
> > To take advantage of DMI based module autoloading, a driver should
> > export one or more MODULE_ALIAS fields similar to these:
> > 
> > MODULE_ALIAS("dmi:*:svnMICRO-STARINT'LCO.,LTD:pnMS-1013:pvr0131*:cvnMICRO-STARINT'LCO.,LTD:ct10:*");
> > MODULE_ALIAS("dmi:*:svnMicro-StarInternational:pnMS-1058:pvr0581:rvnMSI:rnMS-1058:*:ct10:*");
> > MODULE_ALIAS("dmi:*:svnMicro-StarInternational:pnMS-1412:*:rvnMSI:rnMS-1412:*:cvnMICRO-STARINT'LCO.,LTD:ct10:*");
> > MODULE_ALIAS("dmi:*:svnNOTEBOOK:pnSAM2000:pvr0131*:cvnMICRO-STARINT'LCO.,LTD:ct10:*");
> 
> Is there any way to automatically generate these aliases (like we do for
> PCI and USB), in a way that is easier for the developer, instead of
> having to figure out how to create such a "wierd" string like these by
> hand?

Automatically? You mean by having some kind of macro that generates
the string from its parameters or some kind of structure and than use
"file2alias" to generate the alias lines automatically?

I am not sure if that is a good idea, because people really need to
clean up their strings manually before putting them into
MODULE_ALIAS. DMI data blocks usually contain a lot of rubbish. People should
really think twice when writing down those lines.

It's not that difficult to write these strings by hand, they are not
that weird. Also, on systems with this patch applied all you need to
do is run "cat /sys/class/dmi/id/modalias" to get the proper
MODULE_ALIAS string for your respective machine. Then, just replace
all rubbish with "*" and you are done.

If required I can hack up a simple script that generates the data from
dmidecode.
 
> > These lines are specific to my msi-laptop.c driver. They are basically
> > just a concatenation of a few carefully selected DMI fields with all
> > potentially bad characters stripped.
> 
> What is a "bad character" here?

All characters <= 32 and >= 127, and ':'. The latter we use for
separating the DMI fields in the modalias strings, hence we don't want
the DMI data to use that character.

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering; lennart [at] poettering [dot] net
ICQ# 11060553; GPG 0x1A015CC4; http://0pointer.net/lennart/