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SubjectRe: New resources - pls, explain :-(


On Sat, 7 Aug 1999, Martin Mares wrote:
>
> On all sane machines, all regions are automatically enabled by the BIOS.

Not necessarily true at all.

There are actually a number of BIOSes that have an option to enable
_nothing_ but the actual devices needed for booting.

Now, I admit to not having tried that option, because it definitely
doesn't work with the current state of Linux drivers.

> I think that requiring drivers to take care of the dirty work is
> wrong. Also, the address space is large enough to hold all regions
> (if it weren't, the BIOS setup would fail).

I'm not saying the driver should do the dirty work.

I'm saying the _helper_ function should do the dirty work, and I'm saying
that the bootup sequence should _not_ necessarily do it.

Note that on non-PC machines this tends to make more sense. It also makes
a whole lot more sense if you start thinking about hot-plug etc. You
should let the driver do a simple "pci_enable_mem()", and that's the thing
that enables the memory mapping.

The same way you should have the PCMCIA drivers do a
"pcmcia_enable_mem()", for example.

Think of it as a part of a larger pattern. In general, the driver may be
the only entity that knows which memory regions it needs enabled. It's not
just about PCI, it's about the concept.

Linus


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