Re: ISA hardware discovery -- the elegant solution

[Giacomo Catenazzi <cate@debian.org>]

Eric S. Raymond wrote:


> With this change, generating a report on ISA hardware and other
> facilities configured in at boot time would be trivial.  This would
> make the autoconfigurator much more capable.  Best of all, the only
> change required to accomplish this would be safe edits of print format
> strings.


Better: create a /proc/driver and every driver will register in it.
This file can help some bug report (and not only autoconfigurator).

BTW, my new tests for:
   memory (request_mem_region)
   io port (request_region)
   irq (request_irq)
   dma (request_dma)
are nearly completes.
I think every ISA card should registers one of
these resources.
With the check of register_blkdev, register_chrdev
and miscdevices we should have a complete list of the
old ISA devices.
(this would detect only already detected devices,
but autoconfigure is not yet designed for bootfloppies
makers).

With such new test: no patch to kernel and nearly automatic
generation of probes.

Some patch are still welcome. I.e.:
some people with copy+paste have not changes the driver
string. A kernel patch will help distinguish the two drivers.
watchdog: to many driver register as 'watchdog' (or 'serial',
or 'ps2mouse'. This will create some difficulties to
autoconfigurators. A patch will help us (but it would break
other userspace tools?)

	giacomo