At Greg's request I am forwarding this to linux-usb. I would much appreciate if you could CC me on any answers! Thanks, Michael -------- Forwarded Message -------- From: Michael Thayer <Michael.Thayer@xxxxxxx> To: greg@xxxxxxxxx Subject: Requests regarding sysfs documentation and USB Date: Thu, 08 Oct 2009 16:03:52 +0200 Hello, I am one of the Linux people on the VirtualBox team at Sun. I have a couple of unrelated requests regarding the Linux kernel, and it would be great if you could help me with them. The first is a documentation request. Since hal has been deprecated, we are switching to using sysfs in VirtualBox to obtain certain information about hardware on the host system. Despite all warnings, sysfs has proved to be one of the most stable ways of getting such information for a wide range of kernel versions (our code works fine with 2.6.5 up to at least 2.6.31). The way that I have done things so far rather disregards the advice in Documentation/sysfs-rules.txt; I have a feeling though that that advice is somewhat outdated. Would it be possible to update that file to reflect current wisdom? The other request is for some way to inhibit loading of in-kernel USB drivers for specific devices. The reason for this is that for various reasons, it is often desirable to have USB devices entirely under the control of a guest system through /dev/bus/usb, and obviously it doesn't play nice if the host drivers start doing things with the device first. This is presumably something which would be interesting for other similar virtualisation products. I'm more than open to any suggestions about how to do that last without kernel changes (since that would let us do it on existing systems, not just future ones), and otherwise I'm also happy to code up the necessary changes myself, but in that case I would much appreciate it if you could shepherd me somewhat through producing something that would be acceptable for mainline inclusion. Many thanks in advance. Regards, Michael Thayer -- Sun Microsystems GmbH Michael Thayer Werkstrasse 24 VirtualBox engineer 71384 Weinstadt, Germany mailto:michael.thayer@xxxxxxx Sitz der Gesellschaft: Sun Microsystems GmbH, Sonnenallee 1, 85551 Kirchheim-Heimstetten Amtsgericht Muenchen: HRB 161028 Geschaeftsfuehrer: Thomas Schroeder, Wolfgang Engels, Wolf Frenkel Vorsitzender des Aufsichtsrates: Martin Haering -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-usb" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
