Using the "best available" driver

[Pavel Roskin]

Quoting jt at hpl.hp.com:

> 	Hi guys,
>
> 	Sorry to intrude in the conversation.

Jean, you are most welcome.  I appreciate your examples.

> 	A few years ago, probably on this mailing list, I told you
> that driver selection was an essential feature of the old Pcmcia
> subsystem. I'm glad that you have implemented the framework to do
> that, and thank you for all your work on Pcmcia.
> 	Now, I want to start brainstorming about the next step : how
> do we offer this functionality in a friendly form to our users.

And also - how to affect driver selection before the first userspace program
runs.  I think we should not rely on the module interface - whatever we devise
should work with monolithic kernel as well.

> 	The sysfs commands are fine, but they are rather obscure, and
> are not persistent. What would be nice is to have a list associating
> cards IDs with the driver needed. Not an axhaustive list, but just the
> user override. Then, each time the card is loaded, the hotplug script
> would do the necessary magic to get the right driver binded (and
> potentially unload the uncessary driver).

A clean solution is not to have to unload anything.  Drivers should not be bound
to devices if the user doesn't want it.

> 	Personally, I'm not totally happy with the present solution
> where all the policy (driver binding) is done in kernel space out of
> control of the user. We really want to polish that stuff so that it's
> usable by common mortals.

The override table should be available for modification from the userspace.  But
having support for the kernel command line would be useful too.

--
Regards,
Pavel Roskin