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Message-ID: <4910BD0B.7090309@natemccallum.com>
Date: Tue, 04 Nov 2008 16:22:19 -0500
From: Nathaniel McCallum <nathaniel@...emccallum.com>
To: Kay Sievers <kay.sievers@...y.org>
CC: linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [RFC] [PATCH] Loaded driver modalias
Kay Sievers wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 4, 2008 at 19:39, Nathaniel McCallum
> <nathaniel@...emccallum.com> wrote:
>
>> Please CC me to responses as I'm not subscribed to LKML. Also, this is my
>> first kernel patch, advise is certainly welcome.
>>
>> For something I'm working on I have the need to answer the question, "given
>> a hardware ID, does Linux distro X have a driver to support this hardware?"
>> and more specifically, "which drivers support this hardware?" I can,
>> generally speaking, get this data from files like
>> /lib/modules/*/modules.alias. However, this does not work for drivers built
>> into the kernel. With that in mind, I've cooked up a little proof of
>> concept. Basically, its a sysfs file
>> /sys/modules/$module/drivers/$driver/modalias that, when read, contains
>> modalias-style filters for this driver.
>>
>> The attached patch only does this for PCI drivers, each subsystem would need
>> a patch like this. Is this idea crazy? Is there a better implementation?
>>
>
> Hmm, what if that gets larger than 4k? It seems not really like
> something for sysfs. There are also drivers which export a modalias
> which matches more devices, than the device it actually would accept
> to bind to. Some driver have logic in the match() function to exclude
> stuff.
>
Also, would it not be possible to break the 4k barrier with a binary
attribute?
Nathaniel
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