From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id ; Thu, 17 May 2001 13:05:14 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id ; Thu, 17 May 2001 13:04:54 -0400 Received: from mta1.snfc21.pbi.net ([206.13.28.122]:64405 "EHLO mta1.snfc21.pbi.net") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id ; Thu, 17 May 2001 13:04:45 -0400 Date: Thu, 17 May 2001 10:03:32 -0700 From: David Brownell Subject: Re: LANANA: To Pending Device Number Registrants To: Oliver Neukum , Miles Lane , Tim Jansen Cc: lkml Message-id: <0ac601c0def3$4e4f1a40$6800000a@brownell.org> MIME-version: 1.0 X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.50.4133.2400 Content-type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.50.4133.2400 In-Reply-To: <047801c0dd95$231331e0$6800000a@brownell.org> <01051601562302.01000@cookie> <990079966.25105.1.camel@agate> <01051714073800.01598@idun> X-Priority: 3 Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org > For identifying this is probably the right approach. However identifying is > not enough, as the ioctl discussion has shown. Capabilities are needed. How > can the device registry provide that information ? My feedback on "device registry 0.1" was that I really liked the approach of _modeling_ devices by attributes ... which reminded me of the good things in "attribute based naming" a la X.500/LDAP models. I suspect 0.2 went too far, using XML to expose those attributes to userspace ... :) If each device had a directory node, those directory nodes could be grouped as a "registry" ... the directory contents would list the various bus-specific or type-specific capabilities/attributes. Would those directory nodes be the /dev/... or /devfs/... nodes? I suspect not. > If we register it together > with the device, we might spend a lot of resources needlessly and can't deal > with devices whose capabilities change dynamically. So obviously such a registry should query the drivers/busses directly. > In addition how do we export the information ? Proc ? I think Tim has some ideas here, given a patch I scanned recently... - Dave