Date: Fri, 07 Apr 2000 19:42:06 +0100 From: Paul Richards <paul@originative.co.uk> To: new-bus@freebsd.org Subject: Driver source location Message-ID: <38EE2BFE.B696AD7@originative.co.uk>
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Is this list active? I don't ever seem to get any mail from it. Anyway, this is slightly off topic but I was also wondering whether this list wouldn't be better off as the device drivers list. What's our current thinking of where to place device driver sources these days. A lot of the code has migrated out of /sys/i386/isa over the last year as it's been newbusified but where it's gone to has varied. Some devices are in /sys/pci some are in /sys/dev and the whole thing seems a little messy to me. Why not put everything in /sys/dev and if we need to subdivide do it on the basis of function, and then subdivide each driver on the basis of either bus or arch as necessary. e.g. /sys/dev/lnc for generic lnc code /sys/dev/lnc/pci for PCI bus code /sys/dev/lnc/isa for ISA bus code etc. A lot of the drivers already do this unless they are not multi-bus, in which case they seem to live in the /sys/pci directory (or equivalent). This scattering seems rather pointless and if another bus gets supported later it gets even more messy. I've also been thinking that for drivers that can be made into modules, why not just put them in /sys/modules? If we're hoping that third-parties will start writing modules then life would be a lot simpler if a self-contained package could be dropped in to /sys/modules, rather than having to drop files into X locations. For the static kernel crowd what we need is a tool that can bind modules into a static kernel at build time and then all module-able code can be moved in to self-contained directories. While I'm rambling, the newbusification is also a little haphazard, some drivers have hooked into the newbus probing mechanism but not the new style resource management. I think a driver should be moved over entirely to the new code before it can be said to have been newbusified. Paul. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-new-bus" in the body of the message
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