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

[Greg KH]

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 at 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.

Ok, any suggestions that don't involve hashes?

thanks,

greg k-h