Hi Hans, On Fri, 23 Feb 2007 09:08:30 +0100, Hans de Goede wrote: > I'm glad you like it, but how does this relate to using dmi info in > sensors-detect, if we add that capability to sensors-detect and add a database > with known motherboards and there configs, then that would be a doublure with > having the info in the drivers, this is the main reason why I hesitate. Very good point. I believe that the abituguru case is a bit special. The DMI data is not only useful to find out which boards need the driver. It is also useful to prevent the driver from being loaded on random hardware. Given that the chip is impossible to detect, it would sound sensible to at least prevent the abituguru driver from being loaded on non-Abit systems. If the list of supported boards is short and well known, including it too can't hurt. But we can't do that for the rest of the hwmon drivers. The list of supported boards for each driver is too long and growing too fast to live in the kernel. For other drivers my plan is to just detect them and trigger the module load. For Super-I/O chips, they have ID registers, we can read them and have a table that match IDs to drivers. For SMBus chip, once we have David Brownell's new i2c-core infrastructure, we should be able to write a hwmon-smbus-probe drivers which would probe the SMBus for chips and trigger the right module loading. But it might take a long time before we manage to implement all this. In the meantime we have to let user-space deal with it, which is the case at the moment, and it doesn't work so bad if you ask me. As for sensors-detect itself, there's much more to do with the DMI data than just finding which drivers need to be loaded. I don't think we would bother adding DMI support to sensors-detect just for that, except for the few boards with undetectable chips (uGuru) or which are otherwise known to cause trouble when probed. The true value of using DMI data in sensors-detect is to have a repository of configuration files identified by DMI data, so that sensors-detect can fetch and install a custom configuration file for your system. Being able to find out the right drivers without probing is more or less a side effect. -- Jean Delvare
