Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 27 Jun 2007 11:12:59 -0400 | From | "Martin Owens" <> | Subject | Passive port support |
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Hello,
I've been pondering and searching for answers on the level of support currently in linux for passive port devices (serial, parallel, vga etc) for some time wondering if it's time we looking at integrating user selectable or identifiable components through the standard device paths we currently use for pci/usb/iee1394; at the moment the onus is on driver modules or user land programs to communicate, identify, select and manage all devices connected in this way with no methods to let the kernel know what has been identified, no standard way to tag passive devices with ids or models (thus no way to have modules load on selection, or identifiable strings in device managers etc)
This amounts to a virtual plug (the user or detection/probe software tells the kernel what is plugged in rather than the hardware)
I'm proposing a small kernel manager which handles identified passive ports and what has been identified as plugged into them (hopefully so that the state lasts a reboot) and it may also be good to have a way for passive ports to be registered (for instance graphics card vga) but that's not the most important since xorg handles all that quite well these days.
Once such support exists I can foresee simple gui and cli tools that allow users to probe or select devices for such ports in a standard way; even for ports that I am currently unaware of.
One point against doing this is that such devices are now quite old and most new things are usb anyway. but I still see people struggle with the odd bit of old hardware, printer etc.
Overview:
User Selection -> Kernel Registered -> Normal module autoloads / automounts, udev etc
Please do CC me back in any replies, and er forgive me if I'm posting incorrectly; I've asked around a LOT weather it's a valid question/suggestion.
Best Regards, Martin Owens - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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