[PATCH] Implement Symbol-Based Video Driver Autoloading

[David Nusinow]

Hi Stephane,

On Thu, Nov 15, 2007 at 06:23:23PM +0100, Stephane Marchesin wrote:
>    On 11/15/07, David Nusinow <[1]dnusinow at speakeasy.net> wrote:
> 
>      Hi all,
>         The attached patch uses the symbols in the pci-reworked drivers to
>      determine the correct video driver to load when none is specified by the
>      config file. Before committing it though, I'd like some advice about
>      certain aspects I'm not happy about:
> 
>    Hi,
> 
>    Actually, I don't think it's so much a good idea. It makes sense for the
>    drivers to move away from long, hard to maintain, pci id lists, and use
>    smarter card detection. So that won't work in this case. FWIW we're doing
>    that already.

How do you envision doing this? I haven't seen any code in the server to
allow this yet. I could see it working if the drivers provided hooks for
the server to allow them to scan for themselves (perhaps the probe function
would be sufficient) but the issue that I see is that most distros install
every driver available by default. If the server has to allow each driver
to scan for appropriate cards at startup, I'd imagine this would slow
things up quite a bit. Do you have a very different solution in mind?

The issue I'm trying to address is that pretty much any distro  that tries
to ship a xorg.conf spends a lot of effort figuring out which driver to
load. I'd like to move that logic all upstream, to the server, drivers,
hal, or whatever else. The pci-rework stuff, afaik, did have this model in
mind, and it's essentially based off the linux kernel. I agree that the pci
id's are a pain to manage, so something else might be better, and I'd be
happy to work on that, but I don't really understand what you have in mind.

 - David Nusinow