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Date:      Fri, 8 Dec 1995 11:42:58 +0000 ()
From:      Michael Smith <msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au>
To:        julian@ref.tfs.com (Julian Elischer)
Cc:        phk@critter.tfs.com, se@ZPR.Uni-Koeln.DE, wollman@lcs.mit.edu, current@FreeBSD.org
Subject:   Re: sysctl status right now, and plea for testing.
Message-ID:  <199512081142.LAA06364@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au>
In-Reply-To: <199512071135.DAA18582@ref.tfs.com> from "Julian Elischer" at Dec 7, 95 03:35:22 am

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Julian Elischer stands accused of saying:
> so every driver is called by the SYSINIT code at startup, well before
> it get's asked to probe. At that time. it hooks itself into the
> devsw tables etc. and for devices for which there is no more
> probing to be done, (e.g. /dev/mem) it also
> puts itself into the devfs at this time..
> This brings up the point..
> Should we have a single time drivers are called for initialisation, etc.?

Given that each instance of a device off a driver is generally treated as a
seperate instance of the drive, I'd say that's a bad idea.

> I can see the driver being called once on loading or booting
> to add devsw entried
> once to probe
> once to put sysctl stuff in
> etc..
> I wouldn't mind making sure we co-ordinate on this..
> particularly, devfs and devconf look like they might be duplicating
> some structure..

I'm sure they are 8)  There's something that devfs _really_ should do; it 
should allow devices to arbitrate for and register their usage of IO space
and other resources.  It should also be possible to daisy-chain interrupts
(from drivers that support it), which would require devfs support.

> julian

-- 
]] Mike Smith, Software Engineer        msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au    [[
]] Genesis Software                     genesis@atrad.adelaide.edu.au   [[
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