[Xorg] can't xorg detect on bootup which gfx card is installed?

[Sean Middleditch]

Adam Jackson wrote:

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>On Sunday 15 August 2004 17:40, Kristof Vansant wrote:
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>>root at lupus:/home/lupus# lspci | grep VGA
>>01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV20 [GeForce3 Ti
>>500] (rev a3)
>>
>>so the driver is nv, I don't understand what the problem is.
>>    
>>
>
>Please stop top-posting.
>
>The problem is that we have no way to bind a PCI ID to a driver before the 
>driver is loaded.  We don't have a database anywhere saying "this chip id 
>means i need this driver".  Clearly you as a human can look at the pretty PCI 
>name and know, but the server isn't that smart yet.  What we'd want to do is 
>put that list in the driver itself, so when we first dlopen the driver we can 
>ask it what PCI IDs it supports.
>  
>

For what it's worth, I find that solution to be a step backwards.  That 
means you have to rebuild the entire driver to get a new device working 
that the driver is already capable of supporting.  A lot of driver 
updates to support "new devices" are nothing more than adding IDs to an 
array.

Makes a lot more sense to me to keep all the driver/device mappings in 
an external set of files, and just have the driver manager (the X 
server) figure out which device to load.  Plus, as these are external 
files, they become a lot easier to use by projects/software other than 
the X server itself.  Avoid duplication with things like kudzu and 
discover databases.