pci-rework merge tomorrow

[Greg KH]

On Thu, Aug 23, 2007 at 10:55:45PM -0400, David Nusinow wrote:
> What came up in #xorg-devel is that a potentially better way to do this is
> to use the pci-rework stuff to choose the driver based on symbols. I had
> originally planned to implement this after talking to ajax about it, but
> later on a few of us realized that this information is hard to get at if
> you're not the X server. Specifically, talking to keithp about the
> possibility of having the Debian installer just pick only the right driver
> for the hardware to install rather than all the drivers, we realized that
> the installer couldn't easily get at the information to choose the driver.
> 
> So I went with the flat text file. They're very easy to generate from all
> our up to date drivers as you can see from [0], and for those that aren't
> really being updated for new hardware, it's trivial to just ship a static
> file rather than generate it programatically.

Generating things programatically has the benifit of the file always
being in sync with the driver itself.

You might look at how the Linux kernel handles this kind of thing, we
export from the driver a list of the devices it supports, and then
different tools can be used to load the proper driver when the device is
found.

And yes, in more recent kernels we realized that having userspace do
this matching was stupid and now we do it all auto-magically so as to
keep the logic only in one place, so no list of tables in userspace is
ever needed anymore, we just use the data directly in the modules
themselves when needed.

Something like this, could work the exact same way for X if needed.  I
can look into implementing this if people think it is a sane idea.

thanks,

greg k-h