> On Mon, 19 Feb 1996, Ulrich Windl wrote:
>
[...]
> > detect that CMD640 is present? That would mean that CMD640 is already
> > in the driver!
> >
>
> Well, one would probably have to compile support for
> every driver into the kernel, right? Or at least routines for
> probing. If one does this for every device, talking about a bloated
> kernel here.. Anyhow, I guess it's going to happen with all the PnP
> stuff currently being developed anyways??
>
PnP means you plug in your brandnew card and hope that your brandnew
operating system will recognize it. For Linux that means that we need
a discovery library for devices (PCI is one possibility). Comparing
the results of device discovery with the currently configured devices
(/proc/devices) would then determine the driver that you probably
don't have. If you feed in that information to the Linux
configuration script (or some kerneld) you get a adapted Linux (or a
loaded module (if already present))
Summary: Forget the idea that any existing operating system will be
able to recognize all new cards. That might have been almost true
when Windows 95 came out, but now even Windows 95 has a problem.
I'm already happy when I don't have to open the box to change some
jumpers (that's really playing). If you know what's in your box, you
can configure Linux correctly.
Ulrich