Re: [PATCH 01/10] Add driver auto probing for x86 features

From: H. Peter Anvin
Date: Thu Dec 15 2011 - 20:26:33 EST


On 12/09/2011 12:16 PM, Jean Delvare wrote:
>
> Irrelevant. You load a driver when any, not all, of the devices in the
> system are supported by said driver. This obviously holds for PCI
> devices and drivers (you don't refrain from loading the network card's
> driver because that driver doesn't support your graphics card), the CPU
> device case is no different (in theory at least.)
>

Well, it is, actually. We do a whole lot of tests using boot_cpu_has(),
which really isn't about the boot CPU at all but rather is the
intersection of all features supported by all the CPUs in the system.

There are, however, a handful of drivers which want to be loaded for
"any matching CPU" as opposed to "all matching CPUs" and I guess it
would be useful to have that capability as an alternative.

-hpa
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