Return to BSD News archive
Xref: sserve comp.os.386bsd.questions:13336 comp.os.386bsd.development:2575 Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!msuinfo!agate!violet.berkeley.edu!jkh From: jkh@violet.berkeley.edu (Jordan K. Hubbard) Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions,comp.os.386bsd.development Subject: Re: Notebook / Laptop issues WRT: FreeBSD Date: 23 Sep 1994 01:40:18 GMT Organization: University of California, Berkeley Lines: 42 Message-ID: <35tbm2$5jt@agate.berkeley.edu> References: <35rfhv$b1g@agate.berkeley.edu> <1994Sep22.214854.29723@mega.com.au> NNTP-Posting-Host: violet.berkeley.edu In article <1994Sep22.214854.29723@mega.com.au>, Andrew McRae <andrew@megadata.mega.com.au> wrote: >I am doing some work on making ze0 more generic by recognising >the CIS string in the ethernet card. I also am looking at >porting the Linux PCMCIA stuff, or at least implementing >something similar by putting in a PCIC device driver and >write a daemon that performs some autoconfig when a card >gets plugged in etc. That's great - I knew when I folded the ze0 stuff in that it was just a stop-gap solution (I had a laptop and a PCMCIA ethernet card, and I wanted it to work! :-) and the REAL way to do it would be something more along the lines of what Linux has done. Now that we've got LKMs, it should even be possible to load the driver in on insertion. I personally think that the PCMCIA configuration should be done primarily from user mode, as you've suggested. My ideal system would be something like: 1. You have a `pcmciad' that runs and hooks itself in to the PCMCIA "bus" code by opening a device special (/dev/pcmcia?). It also reads a configuration file that tells it what commands to run when a given type of card is inserted or extracted. 2. pcmciad sleeps on requests, and when it sees a card has been inserted it does a `modload' to pull the driver into the kernel and then runs the associated commands. In the case of an ethernet card, this might #ifconfig the interface up, in the case of a modem it might start a getty on the dial-in side of the serial interface, etc. 3. When it sees a card has been removed, it runs any associated commands (downs the interface, removes the getty, whatever) and then does a modunload on the driver. I would be very interested in seeing something like this done! Garrett Wollman has already done the required changes so that every filesystem except UFS (and that's next, for diskless boots!) and LFS (not usable yet anyway) can be dynamically loaded as an LKM, and I would be very happy to see device drivers next! The VFS stuff will be in 2.0, the device drivers depend on volunteers coming forward! Jordan