On Sun, Apr 13, 2008 at 03:59:20PM +0200, Frans Pop wrote: > I totally agree. The problem being discussed here is exactly how to know it > is needed. If you have better suggestions for that, I'd appreciate it. > > As you specifically say "modern controllers", I suspect that the problem is > limited as I guess those are fairly unlikely to be found in machines that > have an ISA bus. > > I also think the way I've implemented in the Debian installer should be > relatively safe: > 1) ide-generic is only loaded _after_ any otherwise detected modules > 2) it is only loaded if an ISA bus is present > 3) it is only included in the initrd for the installed system if loading it > in the installer resulted in additional block devices appearing OK, great for x86 perhaps, what about other systems? > I would unload ide-generic in the installer if no additional block devices > appear, but unfortunately that's not possible as it is marked "permanent". > > By loading it after any other drivers I expect there will be no issues > during the installation (as the other driver will already have claimed the > device). Making sure it is only loaded for the installed system if actually > needed should avoid problems there. > > ATM I can only see this causing problems in systems that need both > ide-generic and some other driver as adding ide-generic in the initrd is > likely to result in it being loaded before that other driver. In the past debian would load ide-generic last. It worked great. Keep doing that. I am not aware of loading ide-generic after all the other drivers ever causing any harm in the older debian installers. > Again, if anyone has a better suggestion how to implement this (preferably > without asking the user whether he has a device that needs ide-generic, > which most users are unlikely to know anyway), I'd appreciate it. I would say just load the generic driver and let it grab whatever other drivers haven't already. If this causes a problem, then there is a kernel bug to be fixed. It shouldn't be the installers problem. After all what happens if ide-generic and all the other drivers are built in rather than modules? If that broke then the kernel already has issues, and as far as I can tell that isn't a problem. So just load it. If it didn't cause any additional ide ports to appear, then you can unload it again. -- Len Sorensen -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ide" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
