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Date: Mon, 19 Aug 2002 11:19:53 -0700 (PDT)
From: Patrick Mochel <mochel@osdl.org>
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Subject: Re: [PATCH] 2.5.31 driverfs: patch for your consideration
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> Also if You're interested here's the write support for "driver".

This just doesn't make sense. When a device is inserted or a driver is
loaded, the bus tries to attach devices to a driver by comparing the
hardware ID of a device to the list of supported IDs of a driver. This is
handled at the bus level because the format of the ID and the semantics
for matching them are bus-specific.

Regardless, it happens automatically. It just doesn't make sense to let 
people try and bind a device to some random driver. 

Suppose we did support this. If you write the name of a driver to a file, 
we search the bus's list of drivers for a match. We then let the bus 
compare the hardware IDs and call probe if it matches. 

One big problem is that the IDs in the driver are marked __devinitdata, so
they're thrown away after init (if hotplugging is not enabled). So, we 
would have to change every driver. 

Besides, it just doesn't make sense. If $user wants to use a different 
or third party driver, let them rmmod and insmod. 

> PS:  Would you be interested in a patch that would port the pnpbios
> driver to the driver model?

Yes. 

	-pat


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