From owner-freebsd-hackers Wed Sep 22 7:45:38 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from mail.xmission.com (mail.xmission.com [198.60.22.22]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 99EB014D78 for ; Wed, 22 Sep 1999 07:45:35 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from wes@softweyr.com) Received: from [204.68.178.39] (helo=softweyr.com) by mail.xmission.com with esmtp (Exim 2.12 #2) id 11TneG-000470-00; Wed, 22 Sep 1999 08:45:33 -0600 Message-ID: <37E8EB8A.E20E5C44@softweyr.com> Date: Wed, 22 Sep 1999 08:45:30 -0600 From: Wes Peters Organization: Softweyr LLC X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.5 [en] (X11; U; FreeBSD 3.1-RELEASE i386) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Warner Losh Cc: FreeBSD Hackers List Subject: Re: what is devfs? References: <37E88112.8545CFEF@softweyr.com> <37E81109.E7612259@softweyr.com> <19990921000009.54622@hydrogen.fircrest.net> <19990920231629.26284@hydrogen.fircrest.net> <199909212040.OAA27457@harmony.village.org> <199909220150.TAA29152@harmony.village.org> <199909220728.BAA31772@harmony.village.org> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Warner Losh wrote: > > In message <37E88112.8545CFEF@softweyr.com> Wes Peters writes: > : Interrupt, DMA, I/O settings, promiscuous operation, baud rate and parity, > : etc. Any little thing a device driver might desire... > > I had been specifically thinking of things more obscure like the > WNETID for wavelan cards, the frequency ranges for the bktr cards, the > frequency pattern for an ibm lan entry driver I never finished, the > preferred media type for ethernet drivers, the calibrated frequency > for clock boards/parts, the mixer settings from sound drivers, etc, > etc, etc. > > These things are closely related to the more prosaic things like I/O > range, IRQ, DRQ, etc. I'm not sure that the differences between > "configuration" data and other attributes not necessarily common to a > bus are significant enough to warrant special treatment. I gotta find > some time to get into this more deeply. Maybe after pccard has grown > cardbus support :-). > > And the sysctl mechanism might not be a bad one to make persistant. > However, there are some issues with having multiple instances of > sysctls that would need to be generically solved at the same time. I'm sure you can handle the easy stuff, now that I've done the genius part. ;^) > There, the whole problem of the persistant parts of devfsd has been > reduced to basically /etc/rc.sysctl which should make the "we don't > need devfsd to do persitance" folks happy. :-) Yup. All we have to do is make the API modify the driver AND the database, and load the database so the drivers can get at the info a boot time. This design work is kinda fun, I wonder if I can get somebody to pay me to do it? Nah, they always end up wanting me to write code (i.e. WORK) for a living. -- "Where am I, and what am I doing in this handbasket?" Wes Peters Softweyr LLC wes@softweyr.com http://softweyr.com/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message