Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id ; Thu, 3 Jan 2002 16:45:25 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id ; Thu, 3 Jan 2002 16:45:16 -0500 Received: from tourian.nerim.net ([62.4.16.79]:49412 "HELO tourian.nerim.net") by vger.kernel.org with SMTP id ; Thu, 3 Jan 2002 16:44:59 -0500 Message-ID: <3C34D0D9.6010008@free.fr> Date: Thu, 03 Jan 2002 22:44:57 +0100 From: Lionel Bouton User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.7+) Gecko/20020101 X-Accept-Language: en-us MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Alan Cox Cc: BALBIR SINGH , esr@thyrsus.com, David Woodhouse , Dave Jones , Linux Kernel List Subject: Re: ISA slot detection on PCI systems? In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Alan Cox wrote: >>This would break things like cross-compilation. Not sure how many people >>use it though. You will have to be on the machine for which you intend >>to compile the kernel. If you are compiling the kernel for the same machine >>then it is the best thing to happen, provided the software doing the >>configuration for u is not broken >> > > I'm really not too worried about Grandma cross compiling kernels ROTFL at the mental image of my Grandma configuring a cross-compiling environment. Eric, you said somewhere else in this thread that eventually we should be able to make kernel configuration as easy as MAC configuration. In short we can't. MAC configuration is a dream we can't touch. The core hardware and most importantly the mainboard firmware is done by the very same company that develops the OS. I guess they didn't shout themselves in the feet and made firmware and hardware with clean enough interfaces that they could make hardware detection trivial. Even if they did mistakes, had bugs, they have the exhaustive list of them and most probably can easily use workarounds. Contrast this with the PC world : numerous mainboard manufacturers, bios developpers, extension card manufacturers, Operating Systems, each with their own bugs others desesperately try to work around... The general case where all works ok (no bugs in dmi, pnp, ...) is the exception and the land here is full of workarounds and dead ends if you want to do hardware detection. The worst case : the plain old ISA bus where you can't try to detect a specific extansion card without risking to lock the system hard by screwing some other type that is listening on ports you probed. What I think we should try is to identify the most stable interfaces (lspci works ok for most systems and would be of great help), use them and let the user fill the gap (ISA/MCA/VLB/AGP bus switches for the *user* is a great idea indeed). We are quite PC centric here. But other archs are certainly far more friendly to what you're up to. LB. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/