Re: Shared interrupt (lack of) handling
Brian Swetland (swetland@be.com)
Fri, 3 Sep 1999 14:51:03 -0700
[Gerard Roudier <groudier@club-internet.fr>]
>
> The right thing to do is:
>
> 1) Do all system intialisations and driver initialisations with interrupts
> disabled.
> 2) For all hardware that can be generically detected (or guessed) and that
> no driver claims handling, warn user about.
> 3) Enable interrupts now.
>
> As a result, loading a driver for hardware after system initialisation is
> a great idiocy, in my opinion. No need to say that I donnot use modules
> for drivers that deal with the hardware and that I will _never_ do so with
> Free O/Ses that allow to use linked driver modules. "ld" does the
> appropriate loading job for me when I am concerned with drivers that deal
> with the hardware.
All well and good until you have to deal with PCMCIA, hot-swap PCI,
and other dynamic busses. You don't have the luxury of having a single
time where you can enumerate everything -- devices could be added later
that are not present at startup, etc.
I used to be very skeptical about modules for this sort of thing, but
after working with an OS that only loads drivers dynamically, I can say
there are some nice things about it.
Handling strange conditions is also nice for driver developers -- you
can get a bit more debugging time if the system is graceful under odd
conditions.
Brian
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