On Thu, 27 Jun 2002 23:19, Gregory Giguashvili wrote:
> One might think of external devices (tapes, scaners, disks, etc.) constanly
> being moved from machine to machine. I understand I can twist /etc/init.d/*
> to support all the configurations. However, I don't see a reason why it
> cannot be the responsibility of Linux kernel to "see" different hardware
> configurations on boot.
We can do this, for some device types. Not just for boot, but for hotplug type
devices as well. The kernel option is CONFIG_HOTPLUG, and it signals
userspace to describe what went on.
It is not appropriate for the kernel to decide what goes on (eg, if you attach
a USB scanner, whether you'd like to load the necessary kernel modules, start
up KDE and kooka, start a scan and save to /tmp/pr0n; or just ignore it for
now because the scanner is noisy, and you'll start it running overnight from
a cron job). So we make such policy decisions in userspace. This is normally
some shell script run as /sbin/hotplug (although you can change the script
name using a /proc interface). Sample scripts can be downloaded from
http://linux-hotplug.sf.net, which has lots more documentation on this.
Does this address your concern?
Brad
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