Date: Mon, 21 Jul 1997 22:56:33 +0200 From: Stefan Esser <se@FreeBSD.ORG> To: Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org> Cc: Shimon@i-connect.net, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: pcireg.h lost children... ? Message-ID: <19970721225633.48908@mi.uni-koeln.de> In-Reply-To: <199707202320.QAA09987@phaeton.artisoft.com>; from Terry Lambert on Sun, Jul 20, 1997 at 04:20:36PM -0700 References: <19970718202558.63332@mi.uni-koeln.de> <199707202320.QAA09987@phaeton.artisoft.com>
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On Jul 20, Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org> wrote: > > One of the changes to the PCI code, that might follow (I have > > not completely made up my mind) is, that the probe will just > > associate a driver with a list of vendor/device IDs, and there > > will no longer be a xxx_probe() function in the drivers. > > How does a PCI driver for, for instance, a DEC chip based ethernet > board find boards for which a vendor/driver assignment has not yet > been made? Well, if the device ID has not been assigned, then the chip most probably does not exist :) If you mean that the list of IDs available to the driver is incomplete: well how is that different from the current behaviour, where a list of device IDs is just compiled into the driver ? > Currently, the probe code will find the board, and it will just work. Hmmm ? I'm not sure I understand what you mean. I surely won't try to attach a board that does only match the vendor ID and the class code. This has been done by NCR in their early SDMS code, and they noticed it was wrong, when it caused boot failures on systems with new chips, that could not be driven by that version of the SCSI BIOS. > One big problem I can see this causing (though I admit it cures > one of my loudest complaints: destructive probing) is that the > vendor/device/driver association list could quicly get too large > to fit on the same floppy as the BSD kernel. 8-(. Hmmm ? The list could for example contain one vendor ID and possibly multiple device IDs on a line starting with the driver name. This is some 10 bytes per unique ID, and well, if you want to support some 100 PCI IDs, may add up to 1KB of highly compressible data :) Regards, STefan
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