1998-03-09 07:36:38

by David Howells

[permalink] [raw]
Subject: Re: cPCI Hot Swap for Linux (system-level issues)

> All issues of this type can be resolved, and I would urge people with more
> recent experience in kernel workings than I to begin drafting some plans for
> how this could be cleanly laid out. The goal would be write a portable "bus
> driver" and a set of clearly specified conventions that writers of device
> drivers could follow so that drivers could be written that would work both
> with normal PCI implementations of the device as well as with Hot Swap cPCI
> implementations.

My configuration manager was written with this sort of thing in mind (though I
was thinking in terms of PnP-BIOS hot-swap at the time)... It uses automatic
rebinding of resources (with driver notification) as its method of conflict
resolution.

However, I haven't gone through and modified the majority of the vast
collection of drivers that Linux has available, as (1) I can't test most of
them, and (2) I would have to re-modify them every time I ported to a new
kernel version.

See:
http://lucifer.hemmet.s-hem.chalmers.se/~dwh

David Howells