From: "James A. Sutherland" <jas88@cam.ac.uk>
To: Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>, jas88@cam.ac.uk (James A. Sutherland)
Subject: Re: Persistent module storage [was Linux 2.4 Status / TODO page]
Date: Tue, 7 Nov 2000 00:38:54 +0000
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Cc: goemon@anime.net (Dan Hollis), dwmw2@infradead.org (David Woodhouse),
        jgarzik@mandrakesoft.com (Jeff Garzik),
        alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk (Alan Cox),
        oxymoron@waste.org (Oliver Xymoron), kaos@ocs.com.au (Keith Owens),
        linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
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On Tue, 07 Nov 2000, Alan Cox wrote:
> > changing settings. If I plug in a hotplug soundcard and load the driver, I do
> > NOT want the driver to decide to set some settings. If I want settings set,
> > I'll do it myself (or have a script to do it).
> 
> How about if your stuff is already nicely set up and you remove then replug
> a device,

When I plug it in and modprobe is triggered to load the driver, a script then
runs to feed the device appropriate configuration info. Since the driver only
resets the hardware when it is given the correct configuration, there's no
problem.

> or remove and swap for an identical replacement part. Most people then
> want the configuration preserved.

Hmm... define "identical". I take a laptop home, use a USB NIC to talk to my
LAN at home (using NAT) with a 192.168.* address. Then I take it elsewhere and
use the same model of NIC on the college LAN. All of a sudden, I get myself
banging on the door complaining about misconfigured NICs :-)
   
> And guess what the simple modutils solution using an ELF section solves that
> too Want to go to default configuration ?
> 
> 	rm /var/run/modules/eth0.data
> 
> or wrap it in a GUI.

That sounds a lot like what I've been advocating all along, if that file is
created/updated by a script when eth0's driver is unloaded, then fed back to
eth0 on load.

> [BTW windows gets the USB speaker state management right, seems they store all
> the module persistent data in the registry!]

Yes, that's what we need. A registry, so configuration problems can be
persistent across boots, and even reinstallations... ;-)


James.
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