Re: [RFC] [PATCH] Loaded driver modalias

[Nathaniel McCallum]

Kay Sievers wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 4, 2008 at 19:39, Nathaniel McCallum
> <nathaniel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>   
> > Please CC me to responses as I'm not subscribed to LKML.  Also, this is my
> > first kernel patch, advise is certainly welcome.
> >
> > For something I'm working on I have the need to answer the question, "given
> > a hardware ID, does Linux distro X have a driver to support this hardware?"
> > and more specifically, "which drivers support this hardware?" I can,
> > generally speaking, get this data from files like
> > /lib/modules/*/modules.alias.  However, this does not work for drivers built
> > into the kernel.  With that in mind, I've cooked up a little proof of
> > concept. Basically, its a sysfs file
> > /sys/modules/$module/drivers/$driver/modalias that, when read, contains
> > modalias-style filters for this driver.
> >
> > The attached patch only does this for PCI drivers, each subsystem would need
> > a patch like this.  Is this idea crazy?  Is there a better implementation?
> >     
>
> Hmm, what if that gets larger than 4k? It seems not really like
> something for sysfs. There are also drivers which export a modalias
> which matches more devices, than the device it actually would accept
> to bind to. Some driver have logic in the match() function to exclude
> stuff.
>   
Also, would it not be possible to break the 4k barrier with a binary 
attribute?

Nathaniel
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