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Message-ID: <d120d50005022211384a83726d@mail.gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2005 14:38:48 -0500
From: Dmitry Torokhov <dmitry.torokhov@gmail.com>
Reply-To: dtor_core@ameritech.net
To: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Subject: Re: POSTing of video cards (WAS: Solo Xgl..)
Cc: Jon Smirl <jonsmirl@gmail.com>,
       Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org>,
       Dave Airlie <airlied@linux.ie>, dri-devel@lists.sourceforge.net,
       xorg@lists.freedesktop.org,
       Linux Kernel list <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
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On Tue, 22 Feb 2005 11:19:10 -0800 (PST), Linus Torvalds
<torvalds@osdl.org> wrote:
> 
> 
> On Mon, 21 Feb 2005, Jon Smirl wrote:
> >
> > I was working on the assumption that all PCI based, VGA class hardware
> > that is not the boot device needs to be posted.
> 
> I don't think that's true. We certainly don't _want_ it to be true in the
> long run - and even now there are cards that we can initialize fully
> without using the BIOS at all.
> 
> > And that the posting should occur before the drivers are
> > loaded.
> 
> Personally, I'd much rather let the driver be involved in the decision.
> 
> That may mean that the probe routine knows how to initialize the card, but
> it may mean that it does an "exec_usermodehelper()" kind of thing.
> Actually, I'd prefer it if this was largely up to "udev": if the driver
> notices that it can't initialize the card, why not just enumerate it
> enough that "udev" knows about it (that's pretty much automatic), and let
> the driver just ignore the card until some (possibly much later) date when
> the user level scripts have found it and initialized it.
> 
> That would imply that the driver have some "re-attach" entrypoint (which
> migth be a ioctl, but might also be just a /sysfs file access), which is
> the user-lands way of saying "try again - I've now initialized the
> hardware".
> 

This sounds awfully like firmware loader that seems to be working just
fine for a ranfe of network cards and other devices.

-- 
Dmitry
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