Date: Wed, 1 Dec 1999 12:36:29 -0500 From: Christopher Masto <chris@netmonger.net> To: Warner Losh <imp@village.org>, Mike Smith <msmith@FreeBSD.ORG> Cc: Nick Hibma <hibma@skylink.it>, FreeBSD CURRENT Mailing List <current@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: PCCARD eject freeze (was Re: your mail) Message-ID: <19991201123629.A5734@netmonger.net> In-Reply-To: <199912011605.JAA02250@harmony.village.org>; from Warner Losh on Wed, Dec 01, 1999 at 09:05:38AM -0700 References: <199912010938.BAA00461@mass.cdrom.com> <199912011605.JAA02250@harmony.village.org>
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On Wed, Dec 01, 1999 at 09:05:38AM -0700, Warner Losh wrote: > In message <199912010938.BAA00461@mass.cdrom.com> Mike Smith writes: > : The only "right" solution is for us to mandate that people down cards > : before ejecting them. The physical design of pccards basically gives us > : no other option. No matter how hard we try to get it "right" for > : spontaneous removal, we can't win that fight. > > I agree with this. In fact the pccard standard is very careful to > state that pccard and cardbus support hot insertion rather than hot > swap. > > I wanted to make it suck less and give poorly written drivers more of > a chance to work. I think it's pretty much a given, though, that once one puts a pccard in a laptop, one is very unlikely to be happy if one can't remove it without powering down the machine. Particularly given that laptops are much more useful if you can suspend them. So we need something. I would like to see that something along the lines of a method to shut down the card in preparation for removal, regardless of what kind of card it is. In other words, whereas right now I would have to "ifconfig down" if it's an ethernet card, "pppctl close" if it's a serial card, and unmount the filesystem if it's a flash card, I think there needs to be a way to say "shut down slot X" and either have those things happen based on a shutdown script, or make the underlying drivers fail gracefully (although I have difficulty imagining that happening in the case of a read/write mounted filesystem). There are other contexts for the same issues anyway. USB has devices that go away suddenly, and it _is_ designed to be hot-removable, so people are going to be pulling the plug on network adapters, ZIP drives, etc. We need drivers that are capable of going away cleanly, or at least without a panic. -- Christopher Masto Senior Network Monkey NetMonger Communications chris@netmonger.net info@netmonger.net http://www.netmonger.net Free yourself, free your machine, free the daemon -- http://www.freebsd.org/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
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